志 (zhì) — The Heart's Heading · An Aim Set and Stated · Direction, Not Distance

The top of 志 is not 士. In Warring States bronze and on bamboo strips the character is written 之 over 心, and 之 in its oldest form is a foot — 止 — planted above a horizontal line: this ground, and a step off it. Set that over a heart and the whole character is a single motion, the heart leaving where it is for somewhere it is not. What happened next was a handwriting reform. The clerical scribes of the Han flattened the foot into three strokes, and 之 came out looking exactly like 士, the graph for a gentleman. Every Chinese schoolchild since has been taught a character that appears to be a scholar sitting on a heart, and the scholar is a scribal accident.

许慎 defined 意 with this character — 意，志也 — and then never gave the character he had used an entry of its own. There is no 志 entry in the 说文解字 he finished around 100 CE. 段玉裁 sets out what happened to it: the 小徐 recension has no such 篆 either, and 徐铉, editing the dictionary in 986, supplied one as a back-fill, on the reasoning that a character already doing work inside somebody else's definition cannot go without an entry of its own. What 徐铉 wrote into the gap is 意也，从心，之聲 — heart for the meaning, 之 for the sound. So the famous circle, 意 defined by 志 and 志 defined by 意, is a Song editor closing a loop the Han author had left open, and 段玉裁 has an account of why it was open: 古文有志無識, in the older script this character was already doing the job 識 later took over, so its entry belonged under 識 — and under 識 it was left out. Either way, the element 徐铉 filed as a phonetic is the one carrying the sense. The gloss the commentators settled on puts it back to work — 志者，心之所之之谓, that toward which the heart goes, in 朱熹's phrasing — and the 《毛诗序》 had been playing on the same 之 long before either of them, opening with 诗者，志之所之也. Once the 之 is doing the work, 志 stops being a synonym for what is on your mind. It acquires a direction.

徐铉 made a second entry on the same pass, off a different list, and it is this word written down. 誌 — 言 beside 志 — went into 言部 in 986 as a 新附字, glossed 記誌也, to note and to record. Neither character had been in 许慎's book; both were let in together, nine hundred years afterwards, once the language could no longer be described without them. Then 誌 was struck out, and not by the character simplification of the 1950s — it went in the variant purge running alongside it, the 《第一批异体字整理表》 published in December 1955 and in force from February 1956, which ruled 誌 a variant of 志 and retired it. So one character now carries 三国志 and 县志 and 墓志铭 and 杂志, the ordinary word for a magazine. That looks like a collision and is not one: 陈寿 wrote 三国志 with this character in the third century, and the recording sense belonged to this character long before anybody gave it a 言. 徐铉's stated criterion for the 新附 was 经典相承传写及时俗要用而说文不载者 — characters already handed down in the classics and already in daily use — so 986 did not invent 誌. It gave a line in the book to something people had been writing for centuries. Taking a thing down is what this character has always been for, because an aim inside one person's heart is not yet a 志 anybody else can act on. 立志 uses 立, the verb for erecting a post or a stele — you put it up where it can be seen, and then you are standing next to it.

Every summer, more than ten million Chinese eighteen-year-olds fill in a form called 志愿. It is the document that follows the 高考: you rank universities and majors in order, the ranking is binding, and the verb for doing it — 填报志愿 — names one of the tensest weeks in a Chinese family's year, because the score is already fixed and the only remaining variable is where you say you are going. It is the one piece of state paperwork that asks a teenager to write down a heading and sign it. The same word does volunteer work: a 志愿者 is literally a person who has a 志愿, someone doing the thing because they said they would rather than because they were assigned it. Both uses run on the same assumption — that a 志 is not real to anyone else until it has been stated.

The commonest compound in modern Chinese is 同志, and it is built out of exactly that assumption: 同 + 志, people whose heading is the same one. It reached ordinary speech through the couplet 孙中山 wrote in 1923 — 革命尚未成功，同志仍须努力, the work is not finished, those with us must keep at it — which later hung at his funeral and in offices and schoolrooms for decades, and it then became the standard form of address in the People's Republic, where an older person may still use it for a stranger. Since the late 1980s it has also been the ordinary self-description of Chinese-speaking LGBTQ communities, taken up first in Hong Kong, so which reading a listener hears now depends entirely on who is speaking. A single 志 on a wall carries none of this. It is worth knowing anyway, because it shows what the character does when you double it: the fastest way to say two people belong together in Chinese is to say their headings match.