Tuesday, January 17, 2006

"SCK"



I got this photo along with an email from a young lady in Canada a few days ago. She said when she was 16 years old; she had her grandfather’s initials “SCK” to be tattooed in “Chinese lettering”.

Although the two lower characters and are recognizable, the first character is only a partial of (flow). The three characters do not pronounce anywhere near “S”, “C”, “K”.

11 comments:

  1. this tattoo really "scks"

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  2. I think saying that 安 and 空 are recognizable is a little charitable. It looks to me like they missed the "bend" in 安, and just have crossing strokes. (Granted, some fonts downplay it and make it symmetrical, but I never liked those.)

    What's particularly funny is that 安 can be used to stand in for the letter "n." (There's a take-off of KFC in Wuxi that calls itself DND Chicken (缔缔乡村炸鸡).) How they got "s" out of it is quite a mystery.

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  3. Ah, to be young and stupid again....

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  4. I don't understand how on earth one could think that those characters would somehow equal "SCK". What is going through people's minds when they get these tattoos?

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  5. I live in Taiwan. Someone could do a parallel study of the way people here use totally incorrect English to be cool (especially on t-shirts and in advertising generally).

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  6. Incorrect usage of English by non-English speakers is called "Engrish" and Steve Caires already has a site for them.

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  7. "What is going through people's minds when they get these tattoos?"

    where i used to live, typically Southern Comfort.

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  8. I believe that the first character was meant to be 忘 - to forget. However, wang4 =/= S.

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  9. maybe the first one was meant to be 疏, which is pronounced "so" in Japanese (don't know the Chinese). how 安 could become C I don't know (pronounced AN or YASU) but the last one is read "kuu" in Japanese, which I think makes some sense if it's the initials it's about.

    S?K

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  10. "how 安 could become C I don't know"

    Maybe C for cheap!

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