the concept of "dirichlet character" as we've been reading about it recently seems to defined in a rather "formal" way... well, but i guess that of course there _is_ supposed to be a much less formal treatment available, relating them to continuous characters of the absolute abelian galois group of the rationals... or something like that... but maybe the point is that if if i try to work out that less formal treatment for myself, there seem to be certain puzzles here... for example relating to this alleged concept of "primitive dirichlet character" .... ???....