The lengths I will go to to prove people wrong

This was going to be a pointless digression in another post, instead it's a pointless post all its own. Blame gopower. He's the one who tipped me off to yesterday's front-page Tempo feature in the Chicago Tribune, on the "real" interpretations of kanji tattoos. According to him, the article is online, but without the illustrations which makes it about as useful as a dance review in Braille.

I peeked at it at a Wally World and immediately spotted what I were pretty sure were two mistakes. Now I felt an onus: gopower--and whoever else thought of me when they saw that page--relied on me to critique the article and show them where the authors were wrong! wrong! wrong! How could I disappoint them? Too honest to steal, I would have to overcome my longstanding animus and buy a paper.

Not there, of course, with the retarded checkout that seems standard for city drugstores. I only went in to withdraw money without a fee. monshu had an honesty box in his building, that would do me. Only when I got to the elevator did I notice something not quite right about my paper: The cover photo did not match what was on the front of the box.

The bastards sold me yesterday's paper!

A woman heard me kvetching and said I should tattle to the doorman. I put in another 50 cents and found that all the current papers were crammed into the window whereas all those lying flat were from the previous day. I took the whole stack and dumped it on the doorman's desk, from which I have little doubt it went directly into the trash.

My sense of justice still offended, I took my current paper up to the love nest and used monshu's phone to call the Trib's customer service. First, a hostile phone menu. Then a woman who took my address so she could send me "coupons to reimburse you for the 50 cents" and assured me she wouldn't put me on their mailing list. (If you live here, you already know what a futile, quixotic gesture it was to even ask.)

Next time I want a goddamn Tribune in order to read one lousy article, I'll knock on Bruce's door and ask, "Are you done with today's Tempo section?" (Not on a Tuesday, though. He might mistake me for one of his mysterious biweekly visitors.)

Never fear, though, the much-awaited critique is forthcoming!

Written on our skin

Thanks to dilletante for pointing out that the goddamn illustrations were online after all. Sleep well, gopower, and soundly. You make wake up to find this tattooed to your forehead.


In any case, let the snarky pedantry begin!

First, we have Ms Haberski. This is the only one that the paper's "expert" (the article tells us she's a "researcher", but doesn't say what she's researching, which I find odd) whiffed. She says that with "the symbol for water" (what scholars would call the "water radical"), this one would mean "village", but that without it, "it doesn't really mean much of anything".

Huh? With the water radical, 沌 means "chaos", which is exactly what the wearer thinks it means. (As the second half of 混沌 "primordial chaos", this should be very familiar to caitalainn.) Without it, it means "heap, camp, village"--exactly what the researcher says it would mean with the water radical. Odd. Perchance the reporter screwed this one up?

Next up, Ms Starr. "Circle 7"? Why did she bother with kanji? Why not just head out to the Circle Seven Ranch and ask the owner to brand you? Incidentally, the yen is gaining against the dollar and has almost reached parity with the cent, making me wonder when this feature was written.

Yes, Mr Gonzales, your tat is pure gibberish. I showed the photo to a friend and he said, "Dog plus time moving into the past. Obviously, a time-travelling dog!...It's MR PEABODY!"

Mr Bass' predicament shows the difficulty of "translating" a name into a foreign language. Strictly speaking, names cannot be "translated", since they have no intrinsic meaning beyond singling out a certain referent. The closest one can come is to choose a new name with some semantic connexion to the old name.

For instance, our Chinese class gained another newbie this week. His surname is Shahbaz, which he sometimes shortens to "Shah". Since this is Persian for "king", I (half in jest, full in earnest) suggested 王 (Wang2), a common Chinese surname which is usually translated as "king". The teacher instead went for sound similarity and chose 夏 (Xia4) "Summer". [Believe it or not, the sound represented by x is close to English sh.]

This is an even looser meaning of "translation". Actually, it's transcribing, not translating: Reproducing the same (or similar, given clashing phonologies) sounds in a different script. That's what Mr Bass' tattooist was apparently trying to do. How did he get it so wrong? Here's my best guess: The on-readings for the three kanji would be, respectively, taku i mi. If you read these as an acrostic, you get t-i-m--Tim! I can imagine how someone with no idea how kanji actually work could mistake it for some sort of complicated "alphabet". Maybe he was working from some crappy chart, like the kind that purports to spell out the Egyptian hieroglyphic "alphabet" (and which will like produce garbage when used naively for transcription).

Mr Borek has perhaps the most entertaining tattoo of all. As the expert points out, itai or "it hurts" is the common Japanese expression for "ouch!". "Love--ouch!" isn't very far from what he wanted it to say. "I love this tattoo but it was painful to get" is a great deal of a stretch--I blame journalist's license. Read as Chinese instead of Japanese, however, it could mean "pain-loving" or "prone to aches" (cf. 愛笑 "prone to smiling, always ready to laugh").