I heard this story about how the simplification of one particular character went wrong and they had to abandon the chosen replacement and go back to the original one.
The char is a 16-stroke char, 雕 diāo / to sculpt (radical: short-tailed bird 隹 zhuī). The Language Reform Committee went for 刁 diāo, which is a 2-stroke char, sounds exactly like 雕, and looks like 刀 dāo / knife (thus retaining the sculpting element of 雕) -- a seemingly perfect replacement. The next day, someone published a picture of a bust of Mao Zedong on the front page of the newspaper, with the caption: 毛主席的刁像 Máo zhǔxí de diāoxiàng. The original would've been 毛主席的雕像 (Chairman Mao's sculpted image). For some reason, the Committee had overlooked the meaning of 刁 and the role it could play in terms of the potential damage it could bring. 刁 means sly / cunning, so the clever opportunist was quick to use this one-off chance of punning on it without getting arrested. They withdrew the replacement and have retained the 16-stroke 雕 to this day.
(China)
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