Between 1936 and 1940, Herrlee G. Creel and Peter A. Boodberg engaged in what has come to be seen as a celebrated debate over the nature of Chinese writing. Creel characterized this writing as fundamentally “ideographic.” Boodberg, for his part, objected that by definition writing represents speech, and therefore all writing—very much including Chinese writing—must be fundamentally phonetic. Seventy-five years have passed since Boodberg’s second essay was published. Although a number of influential Western scholars—especially those with an interest in linguistics—have pronounced his to be the final word on the topic, the history of Chinese writing is sufficiently rich to stimulate renewed discussion and perhaps also new ideas (or at least restatements of old ideas). In this essay, I suggest that not only can the category of Chinese characters termed semantographs have an ideographic basis, but the same is true as well for a sizable percentage of phonograms.