Characters #02 - 糶

糶 tiào - sell grain. What at first glance looks like the stereotypical nightmare traditional character (like 鬱 or 鹽), makes perfect sense when one looks at the components on the left, 出 chū, and 米 mǐ rice. 

In the simplified version of the character the phonetic radical, 翟 dí, was left out. Since the modern pronunciation isn't anything like dí, the phonetic is superfluous and was thus cut for a good reason. 

However, 糶 is also coupled with the character 糴 dí which means to buy grain. 入 is substituted for 出, reversing the semantic meaning (i.e. the grain is going in instead of out). As you can see, the pronunciation of this character corresponds with the phonetic, but in the simplified character 籴, 翟 has also been cut, presumably to maintain consistency between the two characters. 

These two characters feature in the concepts 平糶 and 平糴. 平糶 refers to government buying grain at an inflated price and selling it at a low price in order to stabilize the market price. 平糴, on the other hand, was a policy where the government bought grain at market price in years with a good harvest and then stockpiled it in granaries for use during famines et.c.