Sunday, April 11, 2010

from: iona c.
to: tiangotlost@gmail.com
date: Sun, Apr 11, 2010 at 10:03 AM
subject: what does it mean yall?

Yo! A friend just got this tattoo... what does it mean yall?

tattoo
Posted by at

18 comments:

  1. Carl M.April 11, 2010 at 10:25 PM

    庭愛量 Yard love weight.

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  2. AnonymousApril 11, 2010 at 11:26 PM

    Did he just get out of the shower when you took this picture? Tell him to put some pants on!

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  3. Liz MApril 12, 2010 at 7:48 AM

    Or possibly garden love weight.

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  4. Alan SiegristApril 12, 2010 at 9:16 AM

    Maybe the "amount of garden love." Is the guy fond of doing the wild thing out under the rose bushes or something?

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  5. AnonymousApril 12, 2010 at 9:26 PM

    Looks like "garden love amount" to me too. Is this another Gibberish font, or am I missing some cosmic meaning?

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  6. AnonymousApril 13, 2010 at 4:07 AM

    Perhaps not yard/garden but "court"?
    Courtly love is heavy, man.

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  7. ThePenguinApril 14, 2010 at 8:40 AM

    Maybe it's supposed to say something like "(gibberish letter represented by 庭) loves (gibberish letter represented by 量)", along the lines of "A❤B".

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  8. AnonymousApril 14, 2010 at 7:15 PM

    I think ThePenguin is right...

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  9. AnonymousApril 14, 2010 at 7:17 PM

    I thought he might be a statistician called Ting. "Ting loves to measure."

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  10. bob_dApril 16, 2010 at 4:17 PM

    I think ThePenguin has it figured. This is yet another example of a dunderhead who hasn't given a moment's consideration to contemplate the difference between "initials" and "ideograms." Seeing these sorts of tattoos fills me with the uncharitable desire to loudly rebuke the ignoramuses who get them. I suppose they can't help being ignorant... no wait, they can. This shows a supreme lack of interest about the world, even when it applies to something they're doing. Anyone who takes the time and effort to get a tattoo can take a minute to try to think outside their narrow frame of reference and realize that the rest of the world doesn't speak English, only written with 'funny letters' (which seems to be their operating assumption).

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  11. AnonymousApril 19, 2010 at 9:20 PM

    It really worries me when someone goes and gets a 　Tattoo in a language they son't speak, they might not be getting even close to what they think that they're getting. I've seen a lot of mismatched japanese and chinese tattoos, do people freaking use GOOGLE translate to look up stuff???? if so they must be retarded because 12 times out of 5 its wrong or uses an unatural sentence form or uses a mix of casual and formal speech resulting in a retarded sentence or tattoo :S please make the world a better place by either destroying or fixing google translate :D oh and It seems to me that it says garden loving fatty　XD ...
    Ok is it just me or does the last kanji look fucked the spacing is terrible and unbalanced and in the other ones to it gets really thick and really thin, yes i know it supose to look like brushwork but it looks like a 4ーYearold kid scribbled this with a sharpie. the artist" if he/she can really be called that ~eyes roll~ must have been some white guy willing to premanently fucking up some guys arm just to make a quick buck. :(　Why are people so retarded？？？

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  12. dejjApril 20, 2010 at 1:46 PM

    Interesting, my first thought was (家)庭爱(就是力)量. "Power of family love".
    I find the "A❤B"-pattern very convincing though.

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  13. UlasApril 21, 2010 at 8:25 AM

    Tei-ai-ryo in Japanese on-yomi
    Ting-ai-liang in Mandarin
    Ting-oi-loeng in Cantonese
    Jeong-ae-ryong in Sino-Korean

    I was thinking about the Western name rendering in Chinese characters, but judging from these readings, it's certainly not the case.

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  14. wilfredApril 24, 2010 at 2:02 AM

    absolutely horrible, and SHOCKING. This is another example of people misunderstanding, misinterpreting the structure of the language. Unlike English, each character does not represent a singular "word" whether it serve more like the alphabet, and without any direct relation between these characters the three character simply are gibberish when stacked together (yard love weight? wtf?) .

    The first character "ting" is one of the character in "Jia ting" which mean family. but without "jia" ting can also be garden (ting yuen). Likewise, Liang can mean "power" as in "li lian" but again, without Li, Liang doesnt' mean much, and now paired with love, and garden, the meaning is completely lost.

    Meanings aside. These characters are very, VERY poorly drawn, the spacing are off and the weight are totally fucked.

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  15. bob_dApril 27, 2010 at 2:05 PM

    @wilfred:
    It's even more appalling than that. I think ThePenguin, above, is right, and two of those characters aren't even supposed to be words, but are supposed to be *initials,* which is a level of ignorance far beyond thinking each character is a complete word. I can forgive people for thinking that each Chinese character is a word - that at least indicates they have some vague (though granted, very imperfect) notion of what an ideogram is, but to think that each character is not just a letter, but a direct analog of a Roman letter shows an astounding ignorance of the very idea that other languages *aren't the same* as English. (Though anyone who gets a tattoo needs to make sure that someone involved in the process has better than a vague, imperfect understanding of the language.) There's simply no excuse for people living in a developed nation with access to 21st century information technologies to be that ignorant about the world.

    I think the fact that the characters are not well rendered (although they're much better than most of the tattoos seen elsewhere on this blog) takes a backseat to the fact that they're gibberish that display the ignorance of the owner.

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  16. AliciaJune 29, 2010 at 10:27 AM

    Unless hanzi simplifies love from 愛 to 愛 with just the top, roof enclosure and then "friend", the character for love is incorrect. (I only have knowledge of kanji so I'm unsure)

    And yeah, he appears to be proclaiming great love for gardening as far as I can tell.

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  17. GregJuly 24, 2010 at 10:19 AM

    Strange: aesthetically speaking, the first character 庭 is quite nicely rendered; the second character 愛 is not a standard writing (but understandable, for sure); and the poor last character 量 is so poorly executed I think a first-grader could probably do a better job. Still, I think you guys are all being way too harsh on this guy. People are constantly taking symbols and icons and re-appropriating them for their own uses and purposes, often with very little knowledge or understanding about their "true" or "original" meanings. Think of how the Roman script that we use for English evolved, as merely one example... Heck, the Japanese wouldn't have any of their kana symbols without re-rendering and re-appropriating Chinese characters. And these examples are just from the field of orthography, for crying out loud!

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  18. Alan SiegristOctober 18, 2010 at 4:00 AM

    Oh, Alicia and Greg: You might want to know that 爱 is the correct simplified form of 愛 now used in the PRC. Some purists do object to this simplification at least partially because it literally takes 心 out of 愛.

    But the simplified form apparently had been used historically in handwriting long before it was codified in the PRC character reforms.

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