井 The Well. So boring and strict to consider. Are you watching Tic Tac Dough to support the economy?; insert rock or rap cd now; consider going out this evening.
丼What the heck is this? Did someone drop a gum wrapper into the well? Perhaps it is a pinecone.
---------------------------------
與 On "Married With Children", Al made a big deal out of getting a jet power-toilet - the Thompson 3500, or something like that.
島 This is a similar word. It is an important geopolitical word - island - and its bathroom humor nature is not very obvious. At times like this it helps to draw the word oneself on Paint or GIMP, emphasizing what one wants the reader to notice.
---------------------------------
鳥 and 烏 These are two similar words - Bird and Crow. Birds prefer uninhabited islands, and I usually think of President John F. Kennedy and his crew arriving at Bird Island in the South Pacific after PT-109 was destroyed, when I look at this. "Crow" is used in the words "Uruguay", "the Ukraine" and "Uganda".
---------------------------------
壘 The "Stick" was originally used to describe the game of baseball - it was called stickball. This word was developed after many seasons of baseball experience across the big pond. Of course, there are books called "Word Oceans" that were written between in the past 2000 years that are compendia of most every possible combination of word elements. Most of them fit on a bookcase; one of them is a book with 22,000 volumes!
Seriously, when something good like baseball is invented then a new word comes into being. "Electricity" is a concept that gave a different life to the word "lightning" and the word "beautiful" is much more than it originally was, after it was decided to be the word for "America".
In thinking about the "土" under the 3 "田", it seems that it is an incredibly small particle, of dust or smoke perhaps suspended in the air. It puts one in the mind of "baseball is a game of inches" - the smallest deviation in the nature of the contact of bat and ball is the difference between a hit and an out, and most putouts at 1st base are decided by inches or less. How many home runs clear the fence by only a few feet, and how many high fly balls are caught on the warning track?
The 田 is used in a lot of ballplayers' names. Also in "Honda" and "Toyota". "Tanaka", uses it as the first word and "Nakata" as the second word - the Ta and Naka are simply reversed for the two names.
田 has to do with using work as an excuse to get out of spending time with the family. In fact, Japanese are so used to this that a man arriving home at 7:00 pm might be questioned as to why he wasn't out drinking beer and eating at the Tsubohachi. "Why aren't you out earning money for me and the children?"
In so, and in the way it looks, it also has to do with euphemisms, white lies, excuses and alibis - like a fake computer screen for when one is at work, usually in the form of a group of graphs. Graph paper can hide a lot, and it usually directs one (back) to the work one was doing in the first place. It's a great invention; don't get caught off base!
On a more serious note, the "畾" sign, without the "土", is sometimes used to describe situations like the riots in Los Angeles in 1992, where people stockpile food and build bow or gun turrets (on roofs of supermarkets) using sacks of rice; 田 is ricefield and is sometimes synonymous with rice, as in the word "paddy" which describes both. I am sure the particles of 土 were dusted off and the sacks of rice returned to the supermarket after the fighting was over.
As particles of 土 are the basis of physics, the word baseball could be seen as a model of modern society, in which some people are scientists and the rest are producing goods in factories and on farms, goods that are the result of science work.
_________________________
Football is normally described as "American Mode Foot Ball", to differentiate with "soccer", which is just "foot" "ball".
Basketball is "basket" "ball" and ice hockey is "ice" "hockey", using the word for ice and the word for field hockey.
__________________________
In baseball, "hits" are describedas "peace" hits, because "peace" means "safe on base". It's funny, like home plate is "home", and the word "peace" here 安 looks like women in a house. I'm listening to Elvis Costello now; "Secondary modern, won't be a problem, til the girls get home..".
It's kind of a funny usage because the male version of "peace" looks like 平 looks sort of like a pissed-off manager; so, it isn't used for "hit" because the manager would never be pissed off in this situation of getting safe on base.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment