I encountered くすり指 today and I felt very confused so I went and looked it up. Apparently it's the means the ring finger and I think it's the most confusing one since I don't have the culture background.
Went ahead and learned all five fingers, I like 中指 the most, sooooo straightforward 🤣
working at a Japanese company in Japan means sometimes the collaboration workspace plays the explicit versions of the dirtiest English language songs you’ve ever heard and you have to just ignore it
Bugs Bunny accidentally transformed the word nimrod into a synonym for idiot because nobody got a joke where he sarcastically compared Elmer Fudd to the Biblical figure Nimrod, a mighty hunter.
He also solidified the idea of rabbits loving carrots when carrots actually carry very little nutritional value for rabbits. The funniest part of that is that the original joke was a reference to a Clark Gable film where Gable munches on a carrot, it was never meant to imply that rabbits love carrots. The Clark Gable reference would’ve been obvious to audiences in the 40s but it has been pretty much lost to time.
Something neuroscience-y that helps with prose: attention is selective. A character will not notice everything in a room. They will notice what matters to their goal, fear, desire, training, wound, or obsession. A jealous character notices hands. a hungry character notices food. A soldier notices exits. A lonely character notices pairs. Description becomes character when attention has a bias.
Every June, i go to yet another pride festival and I think about gender not as biological or sociological, but linguistic.
We (humans) made all this up. For the sake of simplifying our understanding of the world we live in, we came up with categories that apply broadly to most instances. So when something new comes up, it's easiest to put things in one of those boxes.
This is not always applicable. That's why we have a word for 'fish,' and most people agree on what is and is not a 'fish,' but all fish do not share a common ancestor.
Another example: 'vegetable' is not a useful term in biology, but it is a useful culinary term. So we can put things like tomatoes (fruits), carrots (tuber), and broccoli (flower) in the vegetable category for cooking and dietary classification, even if individually they're different things.
Those kinds of classifications are useful in the disciplines where they are useful, but generally not outside of it. In an ideal situation you look at every instance with individual nuance, but sometimes that can be a bit much.
Arguing taxonomy is a favorite pastime of a certain kind of guy that I work with. It's a way to feel googleably smart, but its not always applicable in real-world situations. (Example: I once said I was cold. He told me that 'cold does not exist, it's the absence of heat.' Which might be true, but hypothermia is real. Warping of metal under extreme conditions is real. Contracting of molecules, shattering of glass, and presence of ice are all very real. So while possibly technically correct, functionally useless as a talking point. Believing that 'cold' does not exist does not make me less cold.)
When trolls are like 'what is a woman,' I'm like... several levels of education above answering that question in a way that they're willing to understand, because they are trolling. They dont actually want an answer and they wont listen to the answer i give them. "You'll still have to go to a procologist instead of a gynecologist." Etcetera.
Those are areas where the words 'man' and 'woman' might be useful distinctions, but it's also really rude to talk about a person's genitals, so I really don't need to know what kinds of doctors they see.
So when a person is not conforming to their gender, it's been easy for me to accept that linguistically they have a right to call themselves whatever they want, their social structure may allow for this, and biologically it's none of my fucking business.
Actually, yeah, you guys wanna see my favorite way a translator ever handled the furigana shenanigans in a manga?
Some background: Japanese is written with a mix of kana (which are phonetic characters that each represent a sound) and kanji (more complex characters which have both a meaning and often multiple possible sounds).
But little kids aren't expected to know every kanji yet, and there can be obscure words or names with oddball pronunciations that would puzzle any reader. So you can also put some small kana alongside the kanji to tell people how to pronounce it. Those are called furigana, and they're common in a lot of manga for youngish audiences.
As an example, here's the kanji 神 (meaning "god") with the furigana that say かみ (kami) in case you didn't know how to spell that one in kanji yet:
But at some point someone figured out that, hey, you don't HAVE to have the furigana match the kanji. There's nothing stopping you from just...
Using a foreign or made-up word but with a built-in definition: the kanji 祓魔師 (exorcise-demon-professional) pronounced as the English word エクソシスト (ekusoshisuto = exorcist)
Letting a character talk to himself really literally: 俺 (me) with the furigana おまえ (omae = you). You, by which I mean me,
Harping on the fact that you have a light themed villain this arc: 光 (light) but with the OTHER WHOLE KANJI 闇 (darkness) as the pronunciation. Darkness, but our darkness is Different because it's actually Light...
Clarifying what someone means like a little parenthetical statement: 俺達 (us/we) pronounced イルミナティ (iruminati = Illuminati). We, the Illuminati...
And many more. Those were just examples from Blue Exorcist that I already had saved to my hard drive. I cannot emphasize enough how much manga likes to create double meanings this way.
As you might imagine, this can be awkward to translate into a language that doesn't have even the slightest concept of furigana.
Usually you end up doing something that either ignores it (just pick the word that was most important of the two, or use the made up word but only define it the first time) or gets the job done but feels a bit like a cop-out (list both words, or put one in parentheses after the other)
But not always. Not in this one case from the first chapter of Blue Exorcist, translated for Viz by John Werry:
Your mission, should you choose to accept it:
物質界（アッシャー）に存在しながらにして 虚無界（ゲヘナ）の神であるこのオレの炎（ち）をひく
物質界（アッシャー）The material realm, Assiah (kanji say material realm, furigana say Assiah)
に in/at
存在する to exist
ながら during/while
にして despite (物質界に存在しながらにして = Despite/even while existing in the material world...)
虚無界（ゲヘナ）The realm of void, Gehenna (same deal as Assiah above)
の 's, of
神（かみ）god
である is
この this
オレ me, I (it's not weird in Japanese to say "this me." It just emphasizes the me. I, who am the god of Gehenna...)
の 's
炎 (normally pronounced ほのお) flame
ちをひく (normally spelled 血 for that ち) to inherit/be descended from (literally, to pull in their blood)
So we've got 炎 (flame) but we're pronouncing it ち (blood) here due to shenanigans
We've already defined Assiah and Gehenna earlier in the chapter, so we can just call them Assiah and Gehenna and not worry about the kanji. It's the 炎（ち）をひく that's a pain to deal with. Rin, our half-demon main character, has inherited Satan's flame in the same way that you have your ancestors' blood in you. Which means we gotta come up with a way to say bloodflames on the fly in English.
And this was a good way, okay?
You exist in Assiah, but the flame of the god of Gehenna runs through your veins!
Goddamn that was slick. You guys saw that, right? I'm not the only one who saw how smoothly that went, am I?
What a good use of the idiom "my blood runs through your veins." You've got word A as furigana on word B, so you find an English set phrase that uses word A and swap word B in instead. Reader expected A and got B, so now both words are in their head and you've gotten the unconventional double meaning across. It's as near a perfect solution as you're probably gonna get.
I'm sure it's not the first time a translator landed on that general solution to the problem, but it was the first time I saw someone do it and it left an impression y'all.
Studying languages has you feeling like a kid sometimes. Like someone will ask “how’s Chinese going” and you’re like “I learned my colors! 😊” or “I can count to ten now”
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