It’s an observation, sweetie–nothing more.

Hey! Hey! Is that a shot?

::grin::

M

I have two object lessons in the dangers of looking at the real thing sleeping down the hall right now.

The plural is useful because it’s inclusive, dear.

Interesting how straight-boy commenters who haven’t shown up for weeks will suddenly materialize to opine on a post about Japanese women’s underwear.

You talking to me, or Zak?

Hanzismatter is also the site that keeps track of the tats. There were a bunch of pictures of tats with the characters “Stop, Woman Flow” that mystified Easterners and led to many crude jokes about menstruation until someone discovered an “alphabet” of characters meant to be used when someone wanted initials. A lot of tat shops bought the font that included this “alphabet”, leading to lots of confusion and gibberish. I just never understood the appeal of writing something indellible on yourself that you personally don’t understand.

Is that the medical term?

To John:

Oh, I know it goes the other direction, too—but thanks for pointing it out again. Have you seen the site that’s devoted exclusively to illiterate kanji tattoos? I don’t remember the URL, but it’s hilarious.

Greg:

“So you think that there is no desensitizing to children when they go to Mc D’s and see a stocking ad with f*ing written on it? I teach in Korea and I hear kids in elementary school saying fuck you and flippin’ the bird and Korean teachers laugh because they don’t think it means anything.”

I agree with you in general, but I think the issue is somewhat different in this specific case. The company name in question starts with f when transliterated, and I think even kids can get that that’s supposed to be the marketing hook. If anything, extending it to fuku*ing to make the company connection clearer would make things worse, not? I don’t think that, in the ad, it reads as a word in the general vocabulary.

In the case of your students, though, what you refer to sounds like a problem. There are a lot more Koreans than Japanese who grow up going back and forth between home and an English-speaking country, and learning through T-shirts and casual usage that the f-word is something you toss around indiscriminately is a set-up for serious trouble.

To Cedar:

I don’t think anyone’s too grown up to appreciate playground humor like that sometimes. And yeah, I noticed.

But check out Hanzismatter for the flip side.