Super Happy Awesome also discovered the real reason why there was a "fuckin sale" in the first place. Apparently fuckin is an unfortunate pun on fukubukuro — "lucky bags." It's a New Years tradition for Japanese retailers to put their overstock from last year into big grab bags and sell them at a discount....
January 13, 2012
What kind of sale?!
Oh... that explains it.
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One of my favorite pictures is of my son at a Japanese Inn holding the key with the name of our room on it...the Ofuku suite.
Considering the way non-Yiddish speakers use the word "schmuck" (a very vulgar, taboo word in Yiddish) we have no reason to make fun.
This is how wars get started.
Yamamoto thought Fleet Week was in Honolulu, not SF.
I remember that Kay Jeweler commercial from a few years ago with the deaf girl at Christmas.
If they had let her sing the "Every Kiss Begins with Kay" tagline/jingle in her deaf-girl voice, I would have immediately ran out to my local Kay's and bought something ... or two somethings.
I would say the same about a store have a "fucking" sale.
Japanese very often simply do not get the English concept of "vulgarity" as it relates to language. Take the ubiquitous kuso. It can be translated as "crap" or "shit" depending on whether the word is uttered by a kid or a gangster. Why have two words that mean exactly the same thing? (Though if you're referring to what bears do in the woods, it's fun, rhymes with "spoon.") Only the "c" word is guaranteed to raise hackles if left unbleeped.
The most cutting insults in Japanese relate to "face" and social standing.
Expats and fluent English speakers have a lot of fun with this kind of thing.
Brings back memories of the Fukyu Japanese restaurant, a popular little lunch spot in midtown Manhattan in the 1970s. At some point some charitable soul must have informed the owner of the error, and so a little curved piece was added to the sign to make it Furyu. Of course everyone still called it by its real name.
Word verification: curst
Richard Lawrence Cohen,
You are reminding me of the First Unitarian Church of Berkeley in Kensington, so called to avoid the obvious unfortunate acronym (by which it was known anyway by everyone who played recitals there). It's now, IIRC, the Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley.
There is a Fukyu in Radcliff Kentucky. That's what passes as sophisticated in Radcliff. Not a great place. More mobile homes than Carters got little liver pills.
I am so ashamed of my state at times.
I was teaching English to a group of Japanese High School students when one cute girl said, clear as day, "penis butter." Somehow I managed to keep my composure and get her to pronounce peanut butter understandably, and not humiliate her in front of the class.
I am so going to heaven. I deserve it.
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