Hopefully, I’m not going to get kicked out for my first question… I am a novice. Using google translate, this site refers to puns about dates: 11月の記念日・年中行事 | 今日は何の日 | 雑学ネタ帳. For example, November 3rd is “Good birthday”, because 11 is a pun about “good” and 3 is a pun about おさん (お産)…
I guess that いい looks like 11? And さん is 3… so 3 is a pun about birth…
How far do these get stretched? November 4th is good embroidery day, because 11 is good and 4 is… “stab”?? Which means embroidery???
5 is apple, because ご in りんご (林檎)… Essentially, how far away from the meaning can these puns get and still be funny to a native speaker?
It’s essentially a form of Goroawase, a wordplay which involves forming words out of the sounds that numbers make. Or vice versa. 11 is いい because 1 is read as いち.
“Embroidery” in Japanese is 刺繍, the first character of which is read as し (i.e. the same as 四), and means “stab”.
But yeah, some of them are fairly laboured, and I dunno how typically native speakers read these sorts of things into the dates.
The one that’s stuck in my head is ナイスの日, because it’s mentioned in The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (the anime movie). It’s July 13th - 七 (なな) , 一 (いち), 三 (スリー).
I had lunch at Lotteria on the 27th of October last year purely because of their 肉の日 special (which runs all the way from the 27th to the 29th, for some reason), and also because I needed a fast lunch so I could go find a spot to view the Kawasaki Halloween Parade. Forgotten exactly what the special was, though - half off double and triple cheeseburgers, maybe? Definitely something to do with double and triple cheeseburgers.
(I confess I didn’t enjoy the burger particularly much, though. Far too peppery.)
