English in Japan (Part 1)

[This post is just a "teaser", such as it were, for the upcoming post on English in Japan. It is English-related, but basically I just saw this ad and wanted to post about it. I left in the guy's contact details in case any readers are interested - hey, age, color, nationality no matter!]




A Fatty Woman Want...

For some reason, this sounds like the title of a reggae song... (sings)

Me woman, she no fatty but
Me a fatty want...
A fatty woman want!
Me a fatty want
etc.
Anyway, sorry Charlie: I can see how you'd be confused with all the "woman as fish" metaphors in English. Yes, she might fall for your line hook, line, and sinker and you'd be reelin' 'em in, or she might not take the bait and end up being the one that got away. But, while tuna can be fatty, people are fat. "Fatty" is used to describe something, usually food, containing a large amount of fat while "fat" is used to describe slightly-overweight, big-boned people with a thyroid condition after they have left the room.

To give this guy the benefit of the doubt, he could be using the nickname (fatty, fatties) in the same way that such guys are called "chubby chasers" in North America but, despite his claims of speaking "properly", his other grammar is want. I mean wanting. If he wanted to use it in that context, he could have just written "A fatty wanted". (A fatty is a noun, fat is an adjective). And though he's South Asian, many of my Japanese students make this same error.

Further, this error is especially noteworthy in Japan, where reticence is the order of the day. There's even a saying about this: iwanu ga hana (literally, "not saying is the flower"). However, here the speaker is not only commenting outright on someone's appearance, they are doing so in a negative way (this is debatable, but in my opinion most people would not be flattered to be called "fat"). Also, they are referring to the other person as an object.

Finally, in Japanese, a person is usually said to have become big, to have gained weight*. There is a derogatory slang term, "debu", which is translated in my 2006 Shogakukan dictionary as, wait for it, "a fatty". It's the equivalent of calling someone a pig in another language. So, get it right, damn it! There's no excuse. Let's pass some good time.

* By the way, there's a trend now in Japan to raise consciousness about weight issues. Worry about so-called "metabolic syndrome" is all the rage. This is a kind of PC-speak for being overweight. It's a bit weird to me, because everyone is already pretty thin here - you rarely see a truly overweight person. Every night I ride home after work past the local temple, there's a squadron of people jogging, stretching, doing jumping jacks, etc. there. I'm not really certain of what everyone's training for, but from the time they're kids, people here are training - not exercising, but training.