[ExI] don't bother

SR Ballard sen.otaku at gmail.com
Fri Aug 7 17:30:32 UTC 2020


He called you that probably as a cute joke because you were so eager to eat his food and tried to be very charming

SR Ballard

> On Aug 7, 2020, at 8:55 AM, spike jones via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
> 
>  
>  
> For years I went to a really good sushi bar down the way from the Lockheed plant, great place, now outta business, but the guy who owned the place and his wife did everything, made the sushi, no other employees.  He was pretty good at Spanish, his English not so much.  When I would go in there, he would say: go aisatsu, Amanojaku, which I assumed means hello friend, even though it sounds a little like: Go, I sat sue, Amanojaku.
>  
> He and I got along fine.  I said I was thinking about learning Japanese, since I like the food so much and admire the culture.  He suggested, no, too hard for American people, learn Spanish.  This is what he did, and we could almost communicate better with my little bit of Spanish than we could with his very limited English.
>  
> So it was years of go aisatsu, Amanojaku.
>  
> Yesterday a Japanese neighbor’s granddaughter was visiting from Japan.  She introduced us, so I said go aisatsu, Amanojaku.  The visiting family laughed.  My neighbor explained that I might be better off sticking to my native language, that English speakers probably needn’t bother with Japanese because it was far too cluttered with subtleties, such as: there isn’t a really universal word for greeting a general acquaintance exactly, nothing analogous to our generic term “friend” the way we use it.  A new acquaintance or friend has different (completely different) terms based on your position (which I interpret as social? position) such as a grandfather-aged man to a child, a child to a grandfather-aged man, two neighbors the same age, gender-specific, oy vey, let’s flee to the universal term “amigo” please.
>  
> It was a pleasant exchange, there were no problems or anything. 
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> But I went on home and looked it up.  After 30 years of calling my Japanese friends amanojaku, I find out Amanojaku is a demon-like beast in Japanese folklore, who devours a child and dresses up in her skin in order to impersonate the child to fool her grandparents into feeding it.
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> All this time for all those years, my sushi guy was saying “Greetings, horrifying demon.”  Why that sly bastard.  I don’t think I will use the other Japanese terms and phrases he suggested I say to attractive young Japanese-speaking women.
>  
> spike
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