Yeah whatever book or website she looked at probably didn't give much if any context but still The way she interpreted what she did see was UNBELIEVABLY lazy
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It's like if my education on the Chinese zodiac was something like this restaurant placemat And I noticed that the Pig sign is "prone to marital strife" So I started saying that the Chinese word 猪, which means "pig", actually MEANS "prone to marital strife"pic.twitter.com/aVt2DdCnEj
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And then in my book about kid wizards I had them use the "猪 rune" as the "Symbol of Heartbreak" and when you write it on someone's house it curses the couple who lives there to get divorced
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And people who were fans of my stupid books made websites with the "猪 symbol" to counsel people on breakups and divorce etc, the way people irl started using "Alohomora" as a fun word for "unlocking" things (like hackers using it for decryption tools)
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Meanwhile the Chinese speakers are just confusedly going "That just means 'pig', why is everyone using the word 'pig' to mean 'divorce'" Just like I'm sure there were a few Harry Potter fans going "I don't understand why a word that means 'red' is used to unlock doors"
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You should look up the late 90’s trend of getting “kanji” tattoos. “It means love” Uhh, not exactly.....
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Yeah this is how Britney Spears, I think, got a Chinese tattoo she thought meant "mysterious" when really it means "gross"
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Replying to @arthur_affect @sw_this and
Do you want our extra special "check your spelling" service, before we tattoo this on you? No? So you want it spelled like you have there. Ok..... h/t to
@RealDMitchell1 reply 0 retweets 5 likes -
Replying to @mithrasangel @sw_this and
Well, it's not "spelling" (that's not really a thing with Chinese characters), it's just context She got a tattoo of the word "guai", which literally means "strange", but in Chinese it's not "strange" in the good way, it's a wholly negative term
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Replying to @arthur_affect @mithrasangel and
It's legitimately a difficult topic, I think, because in America we've done so much reclaiming of words like that in our youth culture -- words like "freaky" and "weird" and "strange" have all been used as positive things by goth teens
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But in Chinese, as far as I know, it's a completely negative term -- to the point where making it a verb, to "guai" somebody, means to "ostracize" or "scapegoat" them I do think the closest English word would be "gross"
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