Brainstorming about history, politics, literature, religion, and other topics from a 'gypsy' scholar on a wagon hitched to a star.
Engrish Tee-Shirt?Excretion is the greater f*rt of bowels, or?
Labels: Poetry Break
posted by Horace Jeffery Hodges @ 3:59 AM
5 comments
I am a retired professor. I last taught at Ewha Womans University, mostly composition, research writing, and cultural issues, but also the occasional graduate seminar on Gnosticism and Johannine theology and the occasional undergraduate course on European history. My doctorate is in history (U.C. Berkeley), with emphasis on religion and science. My thesis is on John's gospel and Gnosticism. I'm also an award-winning writer, and I recommend my novella, The Bottomless Bottle of Beer, to anyone interested. I'm originally from the Arkansas Ozarks, but my academic career -- funded through doctoral and postdoctoral fellowships (e.g., Fulbright, Naumann, Lady Davis) -- has taken me through Texas, California, Switzerland, Germany, Australia, and Israel and has landed me in Seoul, South Korea. I've also traveled to Mexico, visited much of Europe, including Moscow, and touched down briefly in a few East Asian countries. Hence: "Gypsy Scholar."
5 Comments:
Interestingly enough, the four Chinese characters say (with Korean pronunciation) "geum-ji dae-byeon" (금지 대변). "Geum-ji" is used when something is forbidden; it's the "No" in a "No Smoking" sign (or the "Défense de" in a "Défense de fumer" sign). "Dae-byeon," meanwhile, literally means "big excretion," i.e., feces or the act of defecation. This contrasts with "so-byeon," or "little excretion," i.e., urine or urination. If a Korean kid declares that he needs to go to the bathroom, a parent might ask, using pure-Korean vocabulary, "큰 것? 작은 것(keun geot, jageun geot)?" Literally: "Big thing? Little thing?" This is similar to when US parents ask their kids, "Number One or Number Two?"
I suspected the message meant something like, "This is a urinal, you fool, not a toilet!"
Jeffery Hodges
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Maybe that's the subtext of what is essentially "NO POOPING."
Too much information!
TMI, you mean?
Jeffery Hodges
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