Spirit of Perseverance

押忍の精神 (osu no seishin): the spirit of osu. 押忍 (osu) is the greeting shouted in karate halls and many others, a spoken word first; the two characters, 押 push and 忍 endure, were fitted to the sound afterward, which is why push and endure is how the word is usually explained rather than where it came from. 精神 (seishin) is spirit in the ordinary sense, and の joins the two. Where the greeting began is told several ways, an old navy clipping of good morning, a prewar martial-arts school in Kyoto, a sumo word for withstanding a push, and the tellings disagree on the place and the decade, which is what a legend looks like. What the halls mean by it is endurance under pressure, the greeting turned into a creed. Spirit of Perseverance is the house's gloss of that creed; 押忍 itself is the word a student says at the door.