Thursday, October 14, 2004

"Crazy Diarrhea"

* Photo(s) have been removed on behalf of Ms. Naomi Chaney's (owner of the "crazy diarrhea" tattoo) Request *

The original photo can be viewed at BMEzine.com:
http://www.bmezine.com/tattoo/A30402/high/gmrjh83p.jpg


I am speechless...

Chinese translation:
= crazy
= to flow out, diarrhea

Japanese translation:
= mania
= decanting

24 comments:

  1. Hey, I'm not trying to bash you, but instead of making fun, perhaps a knowlegeable asian individual should run some kind of website telling people how to get a asian-language symbol tattoo instead of bashing and poking fun at them. You could prolly make a lot of money by telling people that the tattoo they are looking at is not the one they had in mind. This just seems to me the logical course of action. Yes, it's funny and all, I read in the paper about an exchange student from Beijing who was arrested because he purposely tattooed foul things on unsuspecting caucasians and others.
    He was found out when one girl went to a club in an are with a higher asian population than normal. Apparently the tattoo going in a line down from her belly button to her waist meant "Insert General Tso's Chicken here" instead of "Peace and Serenity will be your salvation", and when she wore a stomach-exposing shirt at the club, some young people informed her of its true meaning.

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  2. Danny, there are already tons of them out there. Just do a Google search on "Chinese Tattoo Translation", you will get over 27,000 sites. When you do a search for "Chinese Character Translation", there are over 300,000 sites. And there are over 82,000 sites for "Kanji Translation".

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  3. Tian my good friend.

    I can see what this person was trying to say with his tattoo. In the "underground" world of rap there is a saying if someone displays an admirable level of rapping skills. Such a person would be said to have "mad skills" or "mad flow." I am pretty sure that this person was trying to get the latter across. Judging by this decision I seriously doubt him/her having this quality.

    Yours truly,

    Tian Zi (Chauncy)

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  4. Chauncy, thanks for that explanation. Without your insight, I would have never guessed it.

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  5. Danny's explanation proves what I've in-stink-tively known for years: that the "music" called "rap" is merely crap with the c removed.

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  6. AHEM! According to Chauncy's explanation, I am confirmed in my lifelong belief that "rap" = "crap" minus the "c."

    Apparently my previous comment to this effect got accidentally deleted. After all, Tian, you wouldn't be such a politically correct pussy as to get offended at a post by someone who thinks rap music is teh suxx0r and delete it with the excuse that it was "racist!!!!!!"....

    ...would you?

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  7. OK....I hit refresh about six times and my previous two comments didn't appear....but they did after I posted the third one. I should have taken the inherent suckiness of Blogger (not to mention IE) into consideration, and tonight it seems that Blogger is sucking even more than usual. My apologies.

    I'll leave now before my foot goes even further down my throat.

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  8. Reginleif, I would like to re-emphasize the purpose of this site:

    "Hanzi Smatter: Dedidcated to the misuse of Chinese characters in Western Culture"

    Having that said, I have no interest, nor opinion of people's taste in music, religion, sexual orientation, ethnicity, political view, dietary habit, personal hygiene rountine, and etc.

    In case you did not know, in Blogger, when a comment is removed either by the website administrator or retracted by the comment's author, it will still show up with a time stamp as "comment has been removed by ..."

    I would like to also recommend Mozilla and Firebox web browsers when visting.

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  9. i'm a 'white' girl who thinks you're CRAZY for not liking rap but you do your own thing. i just think it's interesting that you're gonna get all paranoid/defensive about being pegged a racist when no one has called you such. methinks the gentleman doth protest too much.

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  10. It's also possible he was trying to say "crazy shit" with shit in the sense of "stuff" or "things" but I think the mad flow explaination might be a better one.

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  11. what a giant gang of losers.

    you obviously have no life, no activities to pursue,
    and no intellect beyond the internet with which to divine the nature of the world around you.

    GO OUTSIDE< TAKE A WALK< view the REAL WORLD
    and abandon the stupid internet, it's not good for YOU,
    morons.

    anonymous

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  12. maybe before youre speechless you should read the caption under the photo from the site you got this from. This is my tattoo. I knew pretty much what it meant and got it as a joke to people who get stupid shit tattooed onthemselves without knowing what it was. Though yes I thought it meant violent diarrhea crazy diarrhea isnt too far off. I had help from an asian friend of mine to pick this out.

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  13. "Crazy Diarrhea"
    Did Naomi give you the history behind the choice of kanji? Oddly enough, I happen to know those folks personally... there actually IS a story behind it...

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  14. ...... sorry nm, read the VERY LAST post... she already set ya'll straight :)

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  15. All s/he needs now is an arrow pointing downwards. Somebody get this person some toilet paper, stat!

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  16. If there is a story behind this tattoo then it shows a greater disrespect for another culture than someone's simple ignorance. I would not want another person to purposely misrepresent my own culture or language in order to make fun of themselves and I certainly do not appreciate a person who contributes to my own culture's stunning ignorance of language and worldly affairs.

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  17. he's making fun of the people who misuse hanzi or kanji just because it looks cool, not the culture, not the language.

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  18. Making fun of them isn't cool, it's just correct. If people are willing to have symbols tattooed onto their bodies without the faintest idea of what it says, then they absolutely deserve any humiliation that comes with it.

    This site is great. Those of you who are bitching are ones who have no doubt either a) tattooed your bodies with characters that you thought meant "Strength of Character" and REALLY meant "I touch little boys" or you have those tribal "arm band" tattoos.

    Freaks.

    Keep this site going. Viva Vista!

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  19. I just read through this whole thread, and I understand both sides. There really are a lot of people out there who just put kanji on themselves because it looks cool. However, when I clicked on the image link I didn't see "cool looking kanji". If you are going to have something like that tattooed onto your body, at least make it aesthetically pleasing...

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  20. Just for kicks and giggles, here's a PSP wallpaper version of the infamous tattoo. Enjoy.

    http://img366.imageshack.us/img366/6624/crazyd1fe.jpg

    Keep up the good work HS. I think you guys are on the right track with this gig. Very funny.

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  21. This is in response to the story about the "Insert General Tso's Chicken Here" tattoo. This story couldn't have appeared in the newspaper,at least not a reputable one. Why? Because it never happened. You can find the original story here: http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/hoaxes/roundup.asp. I'm surprised nobody has called BS on it till now, since any Chinese speaker should be able tell it's an unlikely story. For one thing, "General Tso's Chicken" is another one of those pseudo-Chinese dishes that, like Fortune Cookies and Chop Suey, really exist nowhere else except in the U.S. It does have a Chinese name (Zuo Zongtang Ji) and was named after a prominent general (Zuo Zongtang) who helped quell the Taiping Rebellion and suppress Muslim rebels in the Northwest. But since we Chinese people, yea even those of us in the States, don't as a rule eat fake Chinese food, the dish and its name are generally unknown amongst us. Secondly, the morpheme "chicken" (ji) isn't used in quite the same way in Chinese as it is in English. It is indeed used as a euphemism for penis just as in English (which is a rather remarkable coincidence) but exclusively in the puerile form "jiji". You couldn't have the double-entendre effect as you do in English, because convention would require you to either say "ji" which would unambiguously mean "chicken," or "jiji" which would mean unambiguously refer to "penis." In other words, if this tattoo were actually written down in Chinese, no one would get it. Chinese people in the West and at home are generally pretty flattered whenever Westerners spare any thought for us at all, so the idea that some Chinese dude would do something malicious for kicks or because Whitey is mangling his oh-so-sacred language is quite frankly the kind of foolishness only the Western mind can conceive. We do, however, reserve the right to be amused when you try to do our thing and make a mess of it.

    Here's a true chicken story. Besides referring to poultry and male appendages, "ji" is also used as a slang for "whore" in Hongkong and possibly elsewhere. A friend of mine once spotted a white girl with the word "ji" tattooed on her. When he asked her about it, she said (rather defensively, I might add) that she got it because she was born in the year of the rooster. Well, we laughed and we laughed and we laughed...

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  22. What's the point in getting a tattoo from a culture that has nothing to do with you? I'm Irish, i have a shamrock tattooed on my arse. I have my daughter's name in English tattooed on my hip. If you're Australian, get a Koala tattooed on your arse! If you're American, get "I hate bin laden!" tattooed on your arse! But you dont need to put it in Japanese or Chinese, people can read other languages besides those.

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  23. 鸡 is also used as slang for "prostitute" among Chinese in Malaysia. It's pronounced "kwai" in Hokkien and "kai" in Cantonese AFAIK.

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