正直 (zhèng zhí) — Upright and Straight · Correct by an Outside Standard

正 begins as a march. The oracle-bone graph sets a foot — 止 — beneath a small enclosed square, and the square is a walled settlement: the picture is a column moving on a town, which is why the word the graph first wrote is the one now spelled 征, to campaign against. The archery vocabulary keeps the settled sense cleanest: 正鹄 is the centre of the butt, and 正 is where the arrow is once it has answered to something outside itself. 许慎 glosses the character in two syllables — 正，是也, 正 is being so — and reads the graph as 从止，一以止, a foot brought up by a line. Every later use keeps that line somewhere in it. 正月 is the month the calendar is set from; 正 as a verb is to correct one thing by another; a 正楷 stroke is one that answers to a model. The character never names a property a person holds alone. It names a relation to a standard somebody else can check.

直 begins as a look. Its oracle-bone form is an eye with a single vertical stroke rising straight out of it — a sightline, drawn — and the plainest job a sightline does is test a board: shut one eye, sight along the edge, see whether it runs true. Seal script adds the 乚 the modern character still carries at its lower left. 许慎's gloss is the detail worth keeping: 直，正見也, straight is correct seeing, which means one half of this word was already being defined by the other by 100 CE. 荀子 supplies the tool some three centuries earlier — 木直中绳，輮以为轮, timber straight enough to meet the marking line can still be steamed into a wheel — and 绳 there is the carpenter's inked cord, snapped against the wood. 直 is what survives that comparison.

Welded together, the two keep measuring in different directions, and the compound insists on both. The 诗经 carries it in a 小雅 poem where it is what an official is told to be fond of — 靖共尔位，好是正直 — and 洪范 uses it without a person anywhere in the sentence: 无反无侧，王道正直, the king's road neither doubling back nor leaning aside. A road can be walked and inspected, which is the whole point of putting the word there. The same chapter opens its list of the 三德 with 一曰正直, ranking it above firmness and above mildness, and that ordering has held ever since: the other two are corrections, and this is what they correct toward.

The tradition's most famous test case is one Confucius declines to pass. 叶公 tells him that his own district has a man called 直躬, straight-in-his-own-person, whose father took in a stray sheep and who gave evidence against him. Confucius answers that the straight men where he comes from are different: 父为子隐，子为父隐，直在其中矣, the father covers for the son and the son for the father, and straightness is in there. The passage has never settled. It resurfaced in the argument over the 2012 revision of China's criminal procedure law, which stopped short of compelling a spouse, parent, or child to appear in court against a defendant. Read at its least comfortable, it is not a licence for cover-ups so much as a refusal to let 直 collapse into procedure: a man who informs on his father has satisfied a rule and lost the thing the rule was for. Whatever 正直 is, it is not the same as compliance.

In use it is the plainest praise available, and it is nearly always spoken by a third party. 为人正直 — upright in his dealings — is the line in a reference letter, in the short appraisal a work unit keeps on file, and in the couplet hung at a funeral; 我很正直 said about oneself lands as a joke, because the word is a finding and the person concerned is not the one who gets to make it. The compound also does repair work on its own second half. 直 alone is a temperament — 直性子, 心直口快, the person who says it before deciding whether to — and 论语 files that under hazards, alongside courage and caution: 直而无礼则绞, straightness with no manners on it strangles. 正 is the correction. It puts the sightline back against a standard outside the speaker, so that what gets said straight is also, checkably, right.