Monday, March 28, 2005

"Speeding is not Safe"



Reader Callum sent me this photo of his friend's t-shirt.

At first glance, I thought the shirt had on it, which means "high speed press", something that is used in a dry cleaning shop.

Then I realized that the phrase is actually 高速ネ安, but I had no idea what that meant. I then forward the photo to my associates to see if they would recognize what the shirt meant.

So far the consensus is that the third character is actually a miswritten . Therefore the phrase is 高速不安, which means "speeding is not safe" or "high speed anxiety".

= high, tall; lofty, elevated
= quick, prompt, speedy
= no, not; un-; negative prefix
= peaceful, tranquil, quiet



8 comments:

  1. There is a word with 安 using 示 (ネ) as the radical, although its meaning and pronunciation is unknown to me.

    In any case, whatever's on the t-shirt seems like it must be some kind of typo to me.

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  2. typos on T-shirts are the best I remember one of my friends got a temporary tatoo for his gf that was supposed to be hippo (she had a thing for hippogryfs, and that's as close as he could get). Anyways, it's Water + Horse characters I think. But the characters were reveresed, which means stupid. She had it on at a rave and a bunch of kids told her, apparently they laughed so much she had to leave. She dumped my friend on the drive home.

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  3. Hippos are called in Chinese, which literally translates as "river horse." The reverse, 馬河, does not have any significant meaning (unless there is a river named 馬, or two people with these family names are getting married). Nor does 馬 ("horse water").

    In Japanese, however, 馬鹿 (baka) means "stupid."

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  4. it might be interesting to note that the english word hippopotamus comes from the ancient greek for horse (hippos) of the river (potamos) via latin. i wonder when the chinese discovered and named the hippopotamus, and how much that had to do with possible contact with the ancient greeks.

    as for this nonsensical t-shirt, i wonder where the t-shirt is from. the fact that it has "original" before it might suggest that the 高速ネ安 might represent a name of some sort, but it certainly doesn't sound anything like 可口可樂.

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  5. I would like to point out that hippo (or hippopotamus) is different than hippogryphs.

    Hippogryphs is a monster having the wings, claws, and head of a griffin and the body and hindquarters of a horse.

    The closest thing I can think of from Chinese culture would be 麒麟.

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  6. Brian,

    Your friend's GF should be glad that he did not pick out 馬桶 for her, it means "toilet" or "sh!t bucket".

    馬 = horse
    桶 = bucket

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  7. Tian: Yeah, the only thing a hippogryph and a hippopotamus have in common is the "hippo" part of the name. They look nothing alike, and roost in completely different environments--or at least one would assume, what with hippogryphs being mythic creatures and all.

    There's a hippogryph in Harry Potter. I wonder what it was translated as in Chinese.

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  8. Im guessing this is a parady of a coke-a-cola T-shirt, which extends into a drug referance. It seems to specifically referance the use of cocaine. Or meth, but then its not funny.

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