Justice, Shadows, Italians and Other Abstract Nouns

I guess the theme for this week is “strange pop cultural connections I should have made with a certain Italian horror movie years ago.” This might seem like a strange theme to some people, but it’s pretty normal for me. In fact, I think it’s popped up several times before.

On Monday, I blogged about a certain actress Eva Robin’s, whose unique name spelling and she-male status had bypassed me each time I’d seen the Dario Argento film Tenebre. And here I had thought I knew everything there was to know about Tenebre. Not so, even yet. Somehow I missed that the film’s title theme was remade by Justice on the duo’s 2007 track, “Phantom” — a song I own and at one point listened to frequently without ever realizing how much of a debt it owed to a movie I like.

Here’s Justice’s “Phantom”:

And here’s the kickass theme to Tenebre:

The band that plays the Tenebre theme is Italian prog rock group Gobin, who still perform today. Argento featured the band in a number of his films, perhaps most memorably in Suspiria. I had reason to think of the band earlier this week because the trailer for the very gothic and unexpectedly exciting Jane Eyre adaptation by Cary Fukunaga. I swear: Never has Jane Eyre seemed so exciting.

Here’s the trailer:

And here’s the Suspiria theme that is featured in the trailer at about twenty-seven seconds in.

At this point, I should probably point out that this week doesn’t even mark the first time a Dario Argento film was unexpectedly referenced in something else I was enjoying. Comedian Drew Droege has been releasing this awesome videos parodying Chloe Sevign. The Halloween Hallowe’en video uses one of the backgrounds from Suspiria. Watch for it around the 1:10 mark.

So way to go Dario Argento, I guess.

Final note: Now there’s a post tag cluster I never expected to see.

Bad Bouquet

Because everyone has their story to tell.

(Via.)

A Word From the Depths of the Internet

(Spoiler: This post contains ass-paddling.)

Happy weekend. For today, a geeky-minded word-of-the-week:

weeaboo (WEE-ə-boo) — noun: a non Japanese person who favors Japanese culture over his or her own.

Being someone who likes video games and enjoys a significant chunk of what gets shoved under into the “geek culture” label, I’ve run into a few people who might be called weeaboos. Online, I should point out. These folks are indoorsy types, who only brave sunlight to cosplay or perhaps to read manga while sitting on the floor of chain bookstores. I noticed their activity once on IMDb, when I saw that the site lists video games in addition to movies and TV shows and was puzzled that someone had entered the bigger-name classic titles as Sūpā Mario Burazāzu and Sutorīto Faitā. These might be technically more correct in one sense, as they’re literal re-renderings of the Japanese characters that make up these video game titles, but in any other sense it’s ridiculous to insist on transliteration rather than just saying Super Mario Bros. or Street Fighter, especially when the original Japanese titles are supposed to be in English anyway. (That is, you would see Street Fighter on a Japanese game cartridge, not the Japanese characters for “street” and “fighter.”) The IMDb titles have since been fixed, so apparently enough people agreed with me.

But this idiocy, friends, was the work of weeaboos.

The website Know Your Meme explains the history of the term weeaboo. Before 2005, these people would have been called Wapanese — either “wannabe Japanese” or “white Japanese” — but thanks to that source of all things strange and fascinating, 4chan, the term was literally replaced with weeaboo in 2005 when a user hacked the site so that all instances of Wapanese were replaced with a nonsense word from a Perry Bible Fellowship comic.

The name stuck (though sadly the ass-paddling associations did not) and these dorks have been called weeaboos to the point that, according to Know Your Meme, it now gets used more often online than wapanese and the technical term, japanophile. The site also distinguishes weeaboo from otaku, a Japanese word that over there means “fan” or “excessive fan” but over here tends to refer specifically to anime nuts, manga fanatics, or people unnaturally obsessed with Japanese-produced video games. Whereas the otaku simply indulges in their hobby to an unhealthy extent, the weeaboo is the one who addresses you using the Japanese honorific while snacking from a bento box with chopsticks they had imported from Japan, because “they’re just better Japan,” but instead they call it Nippon because that’s what Japanese people call Japan.

I kind of wish equivalent words existed for people obsessed with English, Italian, Spanish or French culture — you know, aside from asshole.

Previous strange and wonderful words:

• acné excoriée des jeunes filles, adulterine, ageusia, ambeer, anosmia
• barrack, bissextile, bloofer, breastsummer
• catholicon, cecaelia, couvade, cranberry morpheme, crwth, cummingtonite
• deasil, decussate, deuteragonist, dingle
• eidolon, epeolatry, epopt, espalier, etui
• fabiform, fissilingual, Föhnkrankheit, folderol, froward
• gallinipper, grandgore, grue, guilloche, gyaru
• hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia, hogo, honorificabilitudinitatibus
• ignivomous, isabelline, itaiitai
• jabroni, jamais vu, jehu, jumentous
• kaffir, kakopygian, knipperdollin
• leman, lemniscate, limnovore, linsey-woolsey, longicorn
• malacia, malison, milt, mongo, morepork
• narrenfreiheit, nef, nihilartikel, nobiliary particle, nosism
• ogonek, ombré, ooglification, orchidectomy, ordured, orf
• pace, pareidolia, pavonated, petrichor, pismire, pong, puggle, pulveratricious, purse
• quacksalver, quagga, qualtagh, quidnunc
• ronion, roynish, rubirosa
• salmagundi, scrutator, seneschal, shebang, sinople, stevedore, suovetaurilia
• teratogenesis, tergiversate, thagomizer, thon, tiffin, tittery-whoppet, tmesis, toby, tyro
• ucalegon, ultramontane
• veneficial, verdigris, vespertilionine, vinegeroon
• williwaw, witzelsucht, wooper looper
• xenodocheionology, xyster
• yazoo, ypsiliform, yoink
• zanjero, zenzizenzizenzic, zinnober, zugzwang

Word nerd? Subscribe to Back of the Cereal Box’s word-related posts by clicking here.

Karen Black Friday

We all know that blackface is not a socially acceptable type of performance, but how do you feel about Karen Blackface?

(Still from the acclaimed Betty Grable biopic Killer Fish.)

Salvador Dali Walking an Anteater Up From the Subway

Sometimes my post titles are not at all misleading.

This should really be enough for you. It’s plenty for me. Happy Tuesday. (Via.)

An Open Letter to My Heavy-Footed Neighbor Upstairs

Dear sir,

It has come to my attention that you apparently keep to two important items on opposite sides of your apartment. I imagine that you need these two items — frequently, in rapid succession — in order to survive, and this and only this explains your constant, plodding treks from one side of your apartment to the other. May I please suggest that you perhaps move these two life-granting items to the same side of your apartment? I would like to enjoy my Hulu programs without straining to hear them over the arrhythmic thuds that serve as the soundtrack to your life.

Please,
Drew

The Nouns of Young Girls

My pick for word of the week is acne-related.

acné excoriée des jeunes filles (ak-neh ecks-ko-ree-ay day joonz fee) — noun: a self-inflicted skin condition resulting from a person’s habit of picking at either real or imagined blemishes, ultimately worsening the quality of the skin.

Translated into English, the term means something like “the acne of young girls,” though the verb excorier is related to the English excoriate, meaning “to wear the skin of,” “to flay,” or “to denounce.” I love that this term exists and that it namechecks the kind of insecure girl who would stand in a mirror and press and stress their face in an effort to rid it of a single blackhead, only to spread the infection and cause a worse blemish than if they had simply done nothing.

But I chose acne excoriée des jeunes filles not only because it’s so wonderfully specific and evocative but also because the thing it describes can be metaphorically extended beyond the world of teens wracked by the horrors of puberty. Really, who can’t relate to the notion of a thing being made worse by virtue of it being fussed over — squeezed and prodded into an otherwise avoidable state of irritation?

Previous strange and wonderful words:

• adulterine, ageusia, ambeer, anosmia
• barrack, bissextile, bloofer, breastsummer
• catholicon, cecaelia, couvade, cranberry morpheme, crwth, cummingtonite
• deasil, decussate, deuteragonist, dingle
• eidolon, epeolatry, epopt, espalier, etui
• fabiform, fissilingual, Föhnkrankheit, folderol, froward
• gallinipper, grandgore, grue, guilloche, gyaru
• hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia, hogo, honorificabilitudinitatibus
• ignivomous, isabelline, itaiitai
• jabroni, jamais vu, jehu, jumentous
• kaffir, kakopygian, knipperdollin
• leman, lemniscate, limnovore, linsey-woolsey, longicorn
• malacia, malison, milt, mongo, morepork
• narrenfreiheit, nef, nihilartikel, nobiliary particle, nosism
• ogonek, ombré, ooglification, orchidectomy, ordured, orf
• pace, pareidolia, pavonated, petrichor, pismire, pong, puggle, pulveratricious, purse
• quacksalver, quagga, qualtagh, quidnunc
• ronion, roynish, rubirosa
• salmagundi, scrutator, seneschal, shebang, sinople, stevedore, suovetaurilia
• teratogenesis, tergiversate, thagomizer, thon, tiffin, tittery-whoppet, tmesis, toby, tyro
• ucalegon, ultramontane
• veneficial, verdigris, vespertilionine, vinegeroon
• williwaw, witzelsucht, wooper looper
• xenodocheionology, xyster
• yazoo, ypsiliform, yoink
• zanjero, zenzizenzizenzic, zinnober, zugzwang

Word nerd? Subscribe to Back of the Cereal Box’s word-related posts by clicking here.