The other day I was at the gym, doing about 25kph on an exercise bicycle, watching a TV interview of a young Japanese idol singer talking about the joys and pressures of her newfound fame. Actually, I was stealthily peering over the shoulder of a jogger on one of the treadmills in front of me, watching the interview on his machine’s personal TV. I couldn’t hear it, but that didn’t matter because a) I was perfectly happy pedaling in time to the Isley Brothers in my own headphones, and b) as is usual on Japanese TV, all the important comments were transcribed in “balloony” script at the bottom of the screen. (For some reason Japanese TV viewers like subtitles even for celebrities speaking their own language.)
I wasn’t particularly interested in the idol’s tales of stardom, and I couldn’t see the screen very well anyway, but as she was talking about how she gets through her day, one word popped up in the captions and nearly floored me. Out of the blue she mentioned...“funk rap.” When I saw that katakana word on the screen, I was so surprised I stopped pedaling, and my bike started emitting little blips asking if I was OK. Amazingly, this otherwise coy teen idol was expressing her appreciation for 90s-era Los Angeles hip hop! I wondered who in particular she might be into: Snoop Dogg? Coolio? Regardless, she seemed positively animated while describing her unorthodox musical preferences. I beamed in admiration at her candor.
It wasn’t until the third time “funk rap” appeared in the subtitles that I realized I was misreading the katakana for “fan club.” In Japanese print the two terms are similar, with an important distinction at the very end: a pochi in one (°) and a chonchon in the other (“). These are unofficial terms for handakuten and dakuten marks respectively. One mark gives the word a terminal /p/ sound, as in funk rap, while the other gives it a /b/ sound, as in fan club. She wasn’t talking about Snoop Dogg at all, but rather her hordes of devout fanboys.
Needless to say, I felt fooled and dejected. I traded out the Isleys on my phone for some NWA and cranked the bike’s resistance knob up to “get outta my face” levels to work off my shame.
This of course was not my first or last kana flub, but at least in this case, it all happened in my own head. I still turn red remembering a visit I paid to a colleague’s literature class several years ago, where they read (in Japanese) the final act of Hamlet with its unforgettable sword fight. Looking at the text, I had to ask a student next to me why the hero was dueling with a “rare cheese” (レアチーズ, as opposed to レアティーズ = Laertes).
These errors are usually attributable to my inept Japanese reading skills, but in my defense, there are a few cases where the fault has been the writer’s. My school’s administration once sent us an email about developing faculty ties through improved cominyucation (コミニュケーション). I showed it to my Japanese supervisor and asked if they were trying to make a clever bilingual portmanteau of koumin (公民 = civilians or community) and “communication.” But she looked at it, scoffed, and said, “No, it’s a typo.” Elsewhere, on restaurant menus around town (hotbeds of katakana errors, I think), I’ve seen such intriguing food selections as “wine and splits” (スピリッツ vs スプリッツ) and “attorney roll” sushi (アボカド = avocado, but アボガド—with three chonchon’s—says “abogado,” Spanish for lawyer).
A “slip of the pen” is called in Latin lapsus calami (not to be confused with lapsus calamari, which would either be an excellent example of lapsus calami or else some kind of unnamed transgression with a squid). I am often guilty of such lapsi in my handwriting. One time in my class, we were discussing places to visit in foreign countries. I had written on the board some student suggestions of world-renowned museums, and we were now sharing what we knew about them. One student raised her hand and said, “Someday I would like to visit the loo.” Stunned by her blunt revelation, I tried to make a joke of it by saying, “Why wait? It’s right down the hall!” She then nodded at the chalkboard, where I noticed that my scrawling of the Louvre Museum looked more like “Louuue”. Rather than point out my error discreetly, she had decided to embarrass me by simply reading what she saw. Not very kouminyucative of her, I’d say.
