Day #4 - 挊
Mandarin: nòng / ㄋㄨㄥˋ (colloquial/vulgar variant of 弄) Cantonese: lung6 (based on the pronunciation of 弄) Other chinese languages: search in dictionary Japanese: ロウ、 ル、もてあそぶ、 いじくる、 いじる、 ひねくる、 たわむれる [1] Korean: 롱 / 농 (not historically borrowed or used)[1]
Having a rich and wonderful history, in modern times, this character has come to mean jerking your penis, stroking up and down, choking the snake, and rubbing it off, and this meaning seems to have evolved two separate times in two different groups of people.
It first appears during the Northern and Southern Dynasties period of China. It was then recorded once again during Ming dynasty in 《五音類聚》. It seems its meaning did not deviate from the character it is a variant of. Other examples of its usage may be seen here.
⿰ - Originating as an ancient variant character of 弄[to do, to play with, to work], this compound ideograph (neither of the components has any relation to its sound, unlike the original version, which is phono-semantic. I am assuming this one is meant to depict your hands going up and down and all sorts of directions as you toil away) consists of 手[hand], 上[up], and 下[down] has 9 Strokes.
Now comes the interesting part: in 2020s, this character has been widely discussed because it turned out to be medieval word for masturbation in Japanese, presently read and written as 千摺り （[センズリ, せんずり] , which is how I became aware of it. This didn't result in it being reviwed as widespread slang (those crowns still belong to オナニー and シコ, of course), but it seems to be real, with an example of a Buddhist monk writing you "shalt not touch your weewee" in this book being present.
It might have been a case of divergent paths leading to a singular character being created, or maybe the character gained a new semantic meaning in Japan. My research skills aren't good enough to answer this. But the tweets were made by Masafumi Takezawa, a Japanese kanji researcher — and I think he'd know better than me about this stuff.
The character also seems to have been used as a character variant of 弄 in Japan. It was also used in some proper nouns.
Anyway, unlike the Japanese jerkoff saga, which happened one thousand years into this character's lifespan, in 1500s, and was then unearthed in 2020 — this character has been used as a slang word for touching yourself in Chinese since as early as 2012, and can be seen in a list of essential mainland slang to know (warning for explicit words, pejoratives, racially motivated words, and so on..) as well as different internet pages [1] [2].
This would mark the presumably second time this character has evolved to have this meaning.