Friday, July 31, 2009

The Triple Entendre ... in Japanese


As a fan of general linguistics and conversation, I'm all about the casual use of double entendres. I mean, talk about spicing up a conversation! Even rarer to this I would say would be a triple entendre, though for this rare gem I'm going to say that you have to cross multiple languages and semantics for it to get in play. Obviously, the context and listeners language abilities also comes into play in this case, making it that more of a well-played item when it shows up.

So what the hell am I talking about? I'm talking about something I said the other day that managed to link up a discussion about Honda CRV productions and itchy girl's parts. All by accident!

Down at Brighton Beach last Sunday, and a Cadillac Escalade followed by an Acura RDX turned past us. Reiko made the comment "looks expensive...", and I asked which one. She meant the Cadillac, which I later found out has a starting sticker price of $62K. I though she meant the RDX, which is actually much less at $33K, but started the discussion that the RDX is basically the deluxe version of the CR-V and that my previous company gained a lot of business from the model change project (codenamed the WQ & ZQ) for both vehicles. Essentially, we designed and implemented the manufacturing systems for Honda's partners.

And on and on I go, explaining in a mix of Japanese and English:
We had a partner who purchased equipment from us that had interchangeable tooling so that they could run 10,000 parts for one model and then 10,000 parts for the other model.
And that's where I got busted.
Reiko:
Chotto matte! Ima manko o itta desho!? (Wait a minute... you just said manko, didn't you!?)

The last part I said while counting the car parts, in Japanese, got me in trouble. In Japanese, 10,000 parts would be ICHI MAN KO (一万個), which is like counting 1 x 10,000, then the counter for items, ko (個). Double entendre: manko is slang for a girl's parts, on par with the p-word in English. So ichi manko, then, would be "1 girls' parts" (一つのマンコ?). But then we have the double play on ichi - literally, itchy, which can also be applied as a modifying adjective in context. So the triple entendre was an "itchy girls' parts" (痒いマンコ).

Anyway, we had a good laugh. The more I thought about it, it was an amazing slip, though I don't know if it could be considered Freudian.

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Alex Baker works in NYC doing web development during the day and puts on a cape to solve riddles and crime by night. In his free time, he shreds the skins in DBCR, explores NYC and other places and geeks out on new tech.