Twenty English Words the Japanese Totally Made Their Own

Not long ago, I was given a package of Ramune-flavored candy. The bag contains individually-wrapped cyan gummi discs, and while that may seem appealing, discs make as reasonable a shape as any for the flavor medium that is gummi. Go on. Think about it.

I have not been able to place the flavor, however. It’s subtle, familiar and vaguely lychee-like, but I can’t say, “Oh, it’s this.” It didn’t help that I had no idea what Ramune was. As it turns out, it’s a lemon-lime flavored Japanese soda, though I have to say that the Ramune candies don’t taste like 7-up or Sprite. And in one of those “That makes sense but I would have never guessed that,” the brand name Ramune is actually just the English word lemonade transliterated into Japanese. (Sayonara, end consonant!)

Ramune is not unique in having been created this way, and Wikipedia has a whole list of these words — both gairaigo, Japanese words based on ones borrowed from foreign languages, and wasei-eigo, constructions using English words that are uniquely Japanese and which an English-speaker wouldn’t say.

Here are twenty kickass ones, which I have chosen mostly on grounds of being the hardest to recognize as being English.

• amerikandoggu, literally “American dog” but used to mean “corn dog”
• bebika, literally “baby car” but used to mean “stroller”
• bōrupen, literally “ball[point] pen”
• buruma, “bloomers” (and I’m just glad someone is talking about bloomers)
• donmai, literally “don’t mind” but used the way an English speaker would say “don’t worry about it”
• eroguro, “ero[tic]” plus “gro[tesque],” and why yes there is a Wikipedia page for that
• furaidopoteto, literally “fried potato” but meaning “french fry”
• gōruden'awā, literally “golden hour” but used to mean “prime time” in the context of TV
• inkī, literally “in-key,” used to refer to when you lock your keys in the car
• jingisukan, literally “Genghis Khan” but used to refer to a style of Mongolian barbecue
• kīsumāku, literally “kiss mark” but used to mean “hickey”
• kyatchihon, literally “catch phone” but used to mean “call waiting”
• majikkutēpu, literally “magic tape” but used to mean “Velcro”
• mūdi, literally “moody” but strangely used to mean “nice”
• nōkurēmunōritān, literally “no claim, no return” but used how English-speakers use “as is”
• pokeberu, literally “pocket bell” but used to mean “beeper”
• ronpari, “Lon[don]” plus the French pronunciation of “Paris,” amazingly used describe the condition of being cross-eyed or lazy-eyed, with one eye on London and the other on Paris
• rorikon, which is known to some English speakers as lolicon, which comes from “Loli[ta]” plus “icon” and which refers to a sexual attraction toward underage girls... and why yes there is a Wikipedia page for that
• sofutokurīmu, literally “softcream” but used to mean “soft-serve ice cream”
• vājinrōdo, which is fun to say, which literally means “virgin road” and which refers to the procession aisle at a Western-style wedding

By a long shot, my favorite is ronpari, just for its poetry.

Also, there was one that I actually doubted: karaoke, allegedly from the Japanese kara, “empty” plus oke, originally from the English word orchestra. For some reason, it didn’t seem possible, but Etymonline backs it up.

Ric Ocasek Gave Me the Chills in the Weirdest Possible Way

I’m offering something personal today, though not about my private life so much as something deeper than that — a little insight as to how my mind works. I don’t completely understand it, honestly, and in putting this out there, I wonder if I’m telling more than I realize. Don’t care about me? That’s cool, because this odd little story happens to hit all the pegs — music, a movie, an obscure video game. They just intersect in a way I didn’t expect… in a way that took twenty years.

You may not find this significant. I do.

Scene One

I’m a kid still. I can’t be more than seven years old. I’m riding in the car of neighbor lady, for some reason, and she’s singing along to the radio. She’s younger than my mom, so the soundtrack skews younger than the Simon & Garfunkelly easy listening my mom listened to. It’s new wave. I don’t know what that is at this point, but I know this music sounds different. I can distinctly remember one of the songs being “Send Me an Angel,” and it might have been the first time I heard that song. I can picture not-my-mom dancing to the chorus, and I guess that’s why I always liked the song, despite the ripe cheesiness of it. But there’s a second song. For the longest time, I wasn’t able to remember the lyrics — just the intro, which I can hear clearly but which defies description. It’s just sounds, really, not even a melody. For years, I’d wonder what that song was.

That’s it.

Scene Two

I’m in high school, maybe in my third year. I’m sick — at-home sick, and for real, too. This goes on for several days and eventually my mom pulls out a gift from her present closet, where all Christmas and birthday give-’ems wait to be given. Feeling bad for her bedbound son, my mom hands me a Super Nintendo game, and I’m shocked that it’s Earthbound, one of the more notorious cult hits of the 90s. It’s by Nintendo but not one of the company’s more commercially successful releases. My mother had no reason to think I’d even heard of the game, and I hadn’t asked for it. I guess she had just picked randomly and lucked out.

I’ve played video games throughout my entire lifetime, but Earthbound stands out for two reasons: It’s surreal and it’s funny. Most of it takes place in Eagleland, which functions like a oddball version of the U.S. — a parody of American culture as devised by a Japanese man that veers between folksy-dorky-funny and disturbingly David Lynch-y strange. It has crazed cultists and corrupt policemen and zombie attacks, but most importantly it has Fourside, a kinda-sorta stand-in for New York City. At one point in the game, the hero passes from Fourside into Moonside, a bizarre mirror world in which where skyscrapers are replaced by negative space outlined in flashing neon. Passers-by speak in backwards talk — “no” means “yes” — and among the enemies that attack you is the melted clock from Dali’s “Persistence of Memory.” It’s pretty weird.

That’s it.

Scene Three

I’m in college now, and brainstorming for a final project in my Flash animation class. I’m at a loss, so on a whim I decide to do something involving dreams. I’ve always thought that dreams work like movies, in a way, and my admittedly limited experience with Flash has allowed me to “make a movie” in the loosest sense of the term. So I decide to adapt a recent dream in which I found myself in a city composed of negative space, neon-flashing skyscrapers. And just as in the game, this strangeness is rooted in a glowing statue that is evil — just evil. I don’t know what made my subconscious dredge up memories of Earthbound so many years later, but in a way it’s appropriate: Dreams and video games are two of the few opportunities a person gets to “be” someone else and control their actions in a type of alternate world, however superficial and temporary.

So I make the little movie. It looks crude today, but I was pleased enough with it to turn it in. I eventually uploaded it to YouTube, not because the world needed to see my feeble attempt at filmmaking but rather because it took a fuckload of time to arrange the various sprites in the fashion I wanted, and I couldn’t let that work go to waste. Here it is:

You’ll notice that there’s no sound. In the version I turned in, there were two songs that played: First, there was “Sixteen Megatons” by Funki Porcini, which I picked for itsdistinctive and likely intentional David Lynch quality. (In an older post I made about Earthbound, I noted how the transition from Fourside to Moonside reminds me of a similar scene in Fire Walk With Me. I told you this game was Lynchy.)

For the other song, I actually picked a track from Earthbound itself: “Theme of Moonside.”

It… weirdly doesn’t sound like video game music, mostly because it’s not so much melodic as atmospheric — and the atmosphere. It teeters toward cheerful, but it’s the wrong kind of cheerful, especially when it falls apart around the forty-second mark. And yes, that is the Little Rascals theme you hear sampled, albeit it a manipulated, off-key version.

The project got an A. It wasn’t graded on artistic merit.

That’s it.

Scene Four

It’s about three years ago. I’m working from home at night, waiting for a late story to come in. I’ve been waiting for a while, and so I pass time by listening to music, stumbling from one playlist to another in search of something new — by which I mean something old that I haven’t heard yet. It was actually this process that introduced me to Hüsker Dü, a band that got me through more than a few terrible, late nights. I don’t know what it is about deadline nights that make me listen to old music.

Eventually, a Cars playlist gives way to some of Ric Ocasek’s solo work, and one song stops me in my tracks: “Keep on Laughing,” from the his 1986 album This Side of Paradise. This is the song I remembered from when I was a kid, the one to which I could only remember the indescribable intro. That intro is also strikingly similar to the “falling apart music” that starts in around the forty-second mark in the song from Earthbound, the one I picked for my video.

I think it’s unmistakable. Here, try for yourself with the two clips side-by-side:

I may be one of those people who hears similarities between songs that those with more musical know-how either dismiss as being coincidental or nonexistent, but this one I feel especially confident about. In fact, the guy who composed Earthbound’s music used a lot of Western pop music, and other people hear the resemblance to “Keep in Laughing” too.

But isn’t odd how this song took almost twenty years to make its way back to me, from the first time I heard it to the first time I was able to identify it? And considering that noise was bouncing between my ears all that time, isn’t it curious how my brain latched onto this segment of video game music without ever realizing the connection my subconscious was making? And finally, is it maybe a little unsettling that the dumb little Flash project I made and the video game that inspired it both concern liminal states and some colorful, strange place between being awake and letting the other parts of your brain take over?

As I said in the first paragraph, this may not seem significant to anyone else. And I regret to admit that this all doesn’t lead up to one clear, stunning conclusion. It’s just a mess, in the end, of memories and pop culture. But I own this mess, apparently. And that’s something.

I guess I’m eager to find out if there will be a Scene Five.

My Twenty Favorite Steel Magnolias Characters (in Order)

Because some mushmouthed, garblespeak version of the South, that’s why.

1. Ouiser (Shirley MacLaine)
2. Truvy (Dolly Parton)
3. M’Lynn (Sally Field)
4. Clairee (Olympia Dukakis)
5. Anelle (Daryl Hannah)
6. Shelby (Julia Roberts)
7. Eglinore (Anjelica Huston)
8. Footsie (Glenn Close)
9. Sioux-Sioux (Cher)
10. Purrlee (Virginia Madsen)
11. Coloradonna (Anabella Sciorra)
12. Kathay (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio)
13. Beff (Kathy Bates)
14. Sassperanza (Annabeth Gish)
15. Dinkles (Mare Winningham)
16. Snoopu (Conchata Farrell)
17. Zavivanah (Laura San Giacomo)
18. Crematora (Amy Yasbeck)
19. Kablammo (Marsha Mason)
20. Snurrrrrr (Teri Garr)

And if you want to create your own Steel Magnolias, it’s easy: Have a stroke, and then try to pronounce one word, get confused, end up pronouncing a different word, have your nurse write that down. Congratulations! You have just dreamed up a Steel Magnolias name for Kim Greist’s character!

The Death of a Swan

Not that long ago, I didn’t live in Los Angeles, and I didn’t live alone. In fact, I had a roommate whom I had known for a long time. As it turned out, we were not actually close. I don’t think we even liked each other.

In the last year of cohabitation, the divide grew especially apparent, and there were times when I felt angry about perceived failures in this less-than-friendly relationship. It also happened that the roommate owned a set of porcelain Anthropologie measuring cups that were shaped like swans. The actual cup formed the bird’s body and then a neck and head extending from there in what would appear to be a handle but which but which seemed to me too delicate for that purpose. Like I said, they were from Anthropologie, where aesthetics always trump functionality and omigod did you see how the drawstring on this shopping bag can also be used as a hair ribbon? Now I’m spinning in a meadow!

Anyway, now that I’m an adult, I try to act reasonably, and I try especially hard not to exact vengeance on inanimate objects, so it’s a testament to my self-restraint that I didn’t drop the swans one by one onto the kitchen floor, to say nothing of just snapping off all their necks while I made my old roommate watch. When I finally moved out, I was actually proud that those swans still had necks: I hadn’t lowered myself.

Two years later, I’m walking back to my apartment, Saturday morning coffee in hand, and I see two girls unloading boxes of stuff from a trunk. There are books, there are cosmetics, and there’s junk generally tossed into these open-topped boxes that I can peer into as I pass by. Clearly, someone’s moving and they’re taking every previous bit of their life with them. I look up at the girls just in time to see a box overflowing with stuff get pulled out of the trunk, and perched near the top of this small junk mountain is one of those fucking Anthropologie measuring cup swans. Naturally, it teetered off the mountain and exploded onto the asphalt. The noise was softer than I would have expected — and I had thought about it — but still satisfying. The other girl, the one not responsible for the swan’s death, laughed a little. “Oh, she’s going to be pissed.” The first girl, stonefaced and unmoved by this tragedy, simply said as follows: “She can suck my dick.”

And that, friends, is the most empowering thing I’ve experienced in a while: Yeah, she can suck your dick, righteously disdainful girl. You don’t have to care.

Foreign Heat (Not a Pornographic Film Title)

I was at the liquor store, “Eetz hot,” the man behind the counter proclaimed. It was hot, in fact. Last Monday afternoon had been sweltering, and it didn’t diminish the moist, chaffing ick of it to recall that the end of the week was forecasted to be ten degrees cooler.

“Yeah, it’s awful. I don’t even want to think about how hot it is in my apartment.”

Him, again: “Yesterday, I go home, and there are ninety degrees!”

Now, this actually stopped me. Even knowing he hadn’t yet mastered English idioms, I was not immediately sure what he meant. Then, I realized: It was ninety degrees inside his house when he got home. I’d just never heard anyone phrase it that way. I thought he was talking about, like, right angles — and godammit, homes need corners, as far as I’m concerned.

Then, the overthinking as I walked home: Isn’t it strange, grammatically, that the temperature is uncountable but nonetheless treated like a singular? Even when it’s almost always given a value of more than one? We say “It is ninety degrees” and not “They are ninety degrees.” If you had learned basic from-the-book English without understanding how it’s actually used, however, I think you might actually be inclined to say, “They are ninety degrees.” It makes logical sense — plural thing is plural thing, rather than singular thing is plural thing. That's how the guy in the liquor store put it together in his head, I'm betting.

Looking at the sentence “It is ninety degrees,” I’d say it looks like a predicate nominative construction — or what we use when we express the idea “X is equal to Y.” If I say “The boy is a murderer,” I’m saying that in this case, the boy is the same as a murderer — boy is the subject and murderer is essentially another subject, because you could flip the sentence around and it would basically mean the same thing. On either end of that is is a noun that being treated equally and assigned the same case. English-speakers would never say “The boy is murderers,” because that doesn’t make sense, yet that would seem to be what we’re doing with “The temperature is 90 degrees.”

Is it just that “The temperature is 90 degrees” is elliptical? We’re really expressing that “The temperature is valued at 90 degrees,” or something to that effect. But no one really says that either; we just say “It’s 90 degrees.” So at what point does a construction like this cease to be elliptical and just become standard grammar? If it’s not elliptical, how do you explain what’s going on here, grammatically speaking?

Well, There Were Moments When

When people think about The Shangri-Las, the 60s girl group, they probably think of pastel confections such as “The Leader of the Pack,” with its corny motorcycle sound effects, or even odes to teenage melodrama such as “Give Us Your Blessings,” in which tragedy climaxes with the simultaneous deaths of the protagonists. But some unfortunate souls may not know that this group performed some cool, progressive work during its run, and one of the standouts is “Past / Present / Future,” a spoken word piece paired with “Moonlight Sonata.” The Shangri-Las released “Past / Present / Future” in 1966, which Mad Men taught us was the same year that The Beatles released Revolver, so you shouldn’t be surprised to learn that other groups began venturing into experimental territory, but the girls in The Shangri-Las were still teens in 1966, so their plunge into the bizarre maybe seems a little more daring.

Here’s the track. You might at first think it’s hokey, but give a listen all the way through. You may end up somewhere darker than where you began.

Keeping in mind that the girls were all still in their teens when the song came out, it’s discomforting how the song allows you to project all manner of horrendous situations onto the narrator. She’s talking about something bad, yes, but she offers no details, so her trauma can be however awful your imagination wants to make it.

So there’s that. But there is also a second reason I love this song: It’s kind of hilarious if you imagine it being just one side of a conversation of some poor guy’s date with a batshit crazy woman. I’ve thought this for years, to the point that when “Past / Present / Future” starts playing on my iPod — and yes, I have this song on my iPod — I can actually time it about right where I play the part of the guy on the date and squeeze my lines in between the ones in the actual song.

And here is what that sounds like, more or less. (Shangi-Las on the left, me on the right.)

[Past. Past.] Well, now let me tell you about the past.

Oh, great. I actually didn’t know that much about —

The past is filled with silent joys and broken toys, laughing girls and teasing boys.

That’s, um, expressive.

Was I ever in love? I called it love. I mean, it felt like love.

I actually hadn’t asked that.

There were moments when. Well… There were moments when.

Is there someone I should be calling?

[Present]

Do you also hear people speaking in unison?

Go out with you? Why not?

What? We’ve been at the restaurant for, like, twenty minutes.

Do I like to dance? Of course.

I definitely did not bring up dancing.

Take a walk along the beach tonight? I'd love to.

We’re in Ohio. Do you know we’re in Ohio right now?

But don't try to touch me. Don’t try to touch me.

Waiter! Check please!

Because that will never happen again.

Believe me — we’re good.

Shall we dance?

I don’t think I — oh, okay, you’re kind of going on of your own there, twirling.

[Future] Tomorrow? Well, tomorrow’s a long way off.

I actually cannot wait for tomorrow.

Maybe someday I'll have somebody’s hand.

Like, you’re going to cut off someone’s hand?

Maybe somewhere someone will understand.

Like, a doctor?

You know I used to sing, “A tisket, a tasket, a green-and-yellow basket.”

Hey. Hey! Waiter!

I’m all packed up and I'm on my way and I’m gonna fall in love.

That’s why you brought a suitcase, I guess.

But at the moment it doesn’t look good.

Wow. No, it does not.

At the moment it will never happen again. I don’t think it will ever happen again.

[Lights dim but do no go completely dark. The actors remain frozen on stage. 

Eventually, the audience decides for themselves that it’s time to go.]

And that, my friends, is everything I have to say about The Shangri-Las’ “Past / Present / Future.”

A Small Victory for Good Taste

Regarding this post and this post, in case you’ve been on the edge of your seat, know that my piece won. Thanks for the votes! Here’s one more painting.

He’s genuinely a talented guy, I have to point out. See more of Danny’s work at his site. And yes, I will let everyone know when the video is ready.