Chop chop

[robotech_master]

As you know, I've been using this chop stamp as one of my user icons for quite a while. My uncle got it in a Chinatown somewhere. The characters under the name "Meadows" are in seal script, an ancient form of Chinese calligraphy no longer used much outside of official seals.

Lately, over on the Avatar Spirit forum, I came across a thread where a fellow was translating a lot of the signage and documents and other characters shown in Avatar: The Last Airbender, so I asked him for a translation of the stamp.

He wrote:

Wow, deciphering those characters was a challenge.

The characters written in modern traditional Chinese are 梅道, and they are pronounced Méi Dào.

梅 Méi means plum or prune, and is also a Chinese surname.
道 Dào means way or path.

So, fundamentally, it's about as close as you can get in Chinese to a phonetic pronunciation of "Meadows." Since these characters can be used to mean either the sound they make, or the words they actually mean, it doesn't have to make much more sense than that.

But still, I think of my Dad, who has had a prune cake on his birthday every year for as long as I can remember just because he likes prunes. So perhaps "the way of prunes" is not so wrong after all…