I have a constellation of diverse and only tenuously linked hobbies and interests that often take me down rabbit holes that are, for good reasons, seldom explored. One of my interests is the Imperial Japanese Navy, and particularly its ships.
One of the ships built for Japan by Yarrow in Scotland (at the time, I believe) just before the Russo-Japanese War was named Niji. People who know Japanese will correctly take this to mean rainbow, but there is a twist. It is not written with the commonly seen character used for rainbow, 虹), but rather with the character 霓, which cannot be read easily or at all by most people walking around these days.
You might wonder what the difference is, and I discovered down a rabbit hole that in China there was a distinction, not between rainbows, but between their imagined pre-carnations. The 霓 character represents a rainbow that is an incarnation (vaporization?) of a female dragon, and the more-common 虹 is the rainbow that represents a male dragon. Who knew? Certainly not me.
I won’t delve into the issue of a rainbow being either male or female, other than to state my minor disappointment at seeing the rainbow, an image I like, being hijacked as an emblem of the LGBTQ people. But I digress.