So I saw someone wearing this T-shirt today: "Being emotionally manipulative isn't very puny rock of you." (The photo's not very clear because it was night and because I had to take it without being conspicuous, but I saw it very clearly and am sure I have transcribed it correctly.)
I really couldn't figure it out. I imagined a movie or TV program where Dwayne "the Rock" Johnson is magically shrunk down a tiny size, after which he is known as "the Puny Rock," and later when he does or says something emotionally manipulative, someone criticizes his behavior as being out of character.
Finally I Googled the sentence and found what I really should have guessed -- that the original version, of which this is a mutant knockoff, says "punk rock." The original was apparently popularized by a K-pop star who wore it once.
(By the way, if pop music from Korea is called K-pop, what do you call rap music from California?)
2 comments:
Back in the 80s I had a stylish T-shirt with a nicely painted Japanese letter on it - making a pleasing design-shape; but a friend who was learning the language informed me that it was displayed upside-down. Similar kind of things as this, I suppose.
There's a (very slight) chance that the mistake was intentional. "Upside down" and "arrive" are homonyms in Chinese, so displaying characters such as 春 ("spring") and 福 ("blessings") upside down is common. I don't know if the Japanese do the same thing; I'm sure the pun wouldn't work in their language, but they've been known to copy other pun-based Chinese superstitions.
I've seen numerous funny Chinese tattoos on people who don't read that language, including 炒麵 ("fried noodles") and 芥藍 (a cruciferous vegetable). I'm shocked -- shocked! -- to learn that skin-mutilation artists lack professional ethics. "You want 'semper fi' in Chinese? Sure, no problem!" (reaches for Chinese takeout menu)
When my cousin Charlie was young, he tried to get a tattoo of "the letter C in Chinese" (never mind that Chinese is non-alphabetic) and ended up with 功夫 ("kung fu"). At least it wasn't "Brussels sprouts" or something!
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