This entire analysis is just a my own hypothesis, but if you look at the meanings of the two kanji that are swapped, you can see why it was easier for 適当 to develop that sort of secondary meaning. On the other hand, 切 carries an idea of ‘closeness’ and even of ‘urgency’, meaning that 適切 is a sort of suitability that ‘sticks’ to the situation and comes as close as possible to what’s needed. In other words, 適当 is a sort of ‘matching suitability’ that corresponds to the situation at hand, which might explain why, at someone’s discretion, it can also express ‘suitably taking care of’ something by simply doing it any which way. For example, why is it that both 適切 and 適当 can mean ‘suitable’, but only 適当 (in Japanese) acquired the additional meaning of ‘irresponsible’ in the sense of ‘doing only the bare minimum/just enough to take care of things’? Well, 当 additionally has the meaning of being ‘equal’ to something or to ‘treat as’ something. Why is this necessary? Well, it’s because different kanji express different precise nuances. It’s as though you’re trying to triangulate the position of something precisely by using what’s around it. By seeing what each kanji is associated with, and how it’s commonly used, you gain a better idea of what exactly it means. It’s a web of information, with each and every node connected to many, many other nodes. As such, what it’s really like to understand a kanji is… you know those visual thesauri that show each word as a node on a graph, a point connected to a whole bunch of other words? That’s what kanji are like. However, it doesn’t stop there: kanji are very often interlinked, with their basic meaning often being drawn from whatever they meant at their inception. You know, prefixes, suffixes and word roots. I think I’ve expressed this once before on the WK forums, but the thing about kanji is that they’re rarely like words in English. However, the other half of the issue is this: just because two things can be translated with the same word in English does not mean they mean exactly the same thing in Chinese or Japanese. Congratulations, However, this point is probably slightly more relevant to Chinese than to Japanese. Knowing that kanji often pair up makes guessing how to parse things much easier. This^ is a very good guess, and is especially relevant to long kanji chains of the sort you can see in titles of official Japanese documents. Otherwise, if there was only one of the kanji, and then another different kanji after it, you might think that those two make one word, but they were supposed to be separate words (if that made any sense). I have no idea, but maybe it got confusing? with two kanji instead of one, then its more obvious to what the word is.
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