Commentary By Hank F. Miller Jr.
Some people collect rocks. Others stamps .
Still others beer cans.My own collection, however, is a you see, I collect bloopers-more specifically, language bloopers.
Not those of flick chicks flubbing their lines, nor those of the print media gumming up spellings. Nor even those of Japanese English learners bungling their \”L\’s\” and \”R\’s\”to announce they at\”clam school, insread of\”cram school\”and so on.
Nope. My collection is much more personal then those mentioned. For I Package together the boo-boos we foreigners make in Japanese.
As shch, I am intimately involved.I am both collector and collectee, observer and observed, cameraman and model, hunter and not -so-elusive quarry.
Let me shamelessly say my collection,-\”Japanese made funny\”- has really become interesting and even some of my friends here are starting to collect and trade their findings when we get together occasionally and it certainly is a real panic !
The girl in the countryside who entered an outdoor\”onesn= hot spring spa\”,only to find a fat cow in the water with her. This, understandably , vexed her to no end. So she shooed it out and then clubbed it to death with a wooden stool.
Or so she explained to a Japanese friend,not knowing she had goofed the key word.
For rather than \”ushi,\”which means \”cow,\” she had meant to say \” mushi,\”which means \”Bug.\” \”Wow,\” her friend thought.\”This is one tough women,I gotta watch her.\”
Then there is the story of a girl who could not get her closet door to close. With guests due at any minute, she phoned her landlord to see if he might run up stairs to help her wiggle the darned thing shut.Except she mistook the word for closet, \”oshi-ire,\” with the word \”oshiri.\”
That\’s right. She told her landlord that she couldn\’t get her butt closed. And that she needed his help because she didn\’t want her guests to peek inside.
Women aren\’t the only ones who trip up badely in the Japanese language. Take the case of a guy who showed up at his boss\’s house one night with some papers to be signed.
He rang the bell and momentarily the door was opened by a petite young girl in a T-shirt and tight jeans, his boss\’s teenage daughter.
The man eyed her up and down and then asked, \”Sumimasen. Ochichi wa?\”He had assumed he was using the polite form for \”father\”and that his question was thus,\”Excuse me.Where is your honorable dad?\”But\”\”ochichi\” means something very different. And what the trimfigured girl heard was:\”Excuse me. Where are your breasts?\”
Next we have the tale of a good friend who drove off in search of a well-known temple.
When he got lost, he asked a women along the road if she could tell him the way.When the women replied that she had no idea, my friend shot back that she must know because the temple was very famous and quite popular with tourists.Yet the women stuck to her words and there was no such place nearby. However, she did have a \”regular\” temple at her house at which my friend was very welcome. He sped away,thinking the women to be somewhat odd nut.
Only later did he realize that instead of the word for temple,\”otera,\” he had mistakenly said \”otearai.\”Which means toilet.
Another friend, on a holiday at the seashore, shouted frantically to prevent a group of school girls from entering the waves.
\”Don\’t go in, girls ! The water\’s full of jellyfish!\” Only he mixed the words\”kurage\” and \”karaage.\” Which resulted in the girls hearing: Don\’t go in, girls! The water\’s full of fried chicken!\”
The same good-hearted friend also tried to protect a pair of female hikers in the mountains near here.\”Don\’t go down that path, girls ! I saw a huge snake there. \”He stretched his arms wide. \”It was this long ! Maybe longer!\”Except in place of \”hebi,\” which means \”snake,\” he instead used \”ebi\”which means \”shrimp.\”The girls avoided the path. They also avoided my friend,probably thinking he\’s some kind on nut case.
Of course, more than just a few of the bloopers in \”Japanese Made Funny\”are pearls from my very own lips.
Isn\’t that amazing just when you thought that you have excelled in the Japanese language. Wow ! What next.
Of these,the one that is usually told first in our Miller family folklore, is the day that my wife caughed up a small amount of blood-\”chi\” in Japanese. I immediately phoned a doctor friend and explained what happened.
The doctor kept calm,but my wife and children did not.They began to hoot like loons.
For I had told the doctor my wife had vomited \”hi\”… which means \”fire.\”
The doctor began to laugh, and I then realized I had made another a boo-boo.
But my wife survived.And so did my pride just barely.
Warm Regards from Kitakyushu City, Japan
Hank F. Miller Jr.
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