Ooh, we haven’t reached 140013 posts yet! I might actually be starting to catch up!
If we want to learn 1 kanji for every 10013件の投稿 in this thread, we need to learn 1313 kanji.
Kanji 7:
件
Kun’yomi: くだん
On’yomi: けん
Meaning: case, affair, matter, item; counter for occurrences
Etymology: Ideogrammatic - A person together with an ox. This could be because man and ox form a unit (Wiktionary), or because a person is counting oxen (Kanji Portraits).
Wani件i: There’s a man next to an ox. The man is of Chinese descent, and his name is Ken.
The ox is Japanese. I don’t know its name, but it has achieved the ninth dan - 九段 (kudan) - in the bare-hoofed martial art known as karahidzume. Just one more and it will achieve the tenth dan, and be ready to teach martial arts at Oxford.
Sadly, he doesn’t get to make use of his kudan very often, since Ken can usually deal with things on his own.
Trivia: While tenth dan is the upper limit in most human martial arts, it is rumored that truly skilled bovines can acually attain eleventh dan. This is known as the Secret Cow Level of martial arts.
Vocabulary:
件 (けん)
counter for occurrences, cases, instances, submissions…
This is an interesting counter with many uses. According to Tofugu’s list of counter, it can be used to count:
proposals, suggestions, legislative bills, agenda items, projects, plans, crimes, incidents, scandals, complaints, objections, contracts, agreements, emails, financing, loans, troubles, bankruptcies, page views, internet access numbers, voice mail messages, etc."
What’s more relevant to us is that it can be used to count forum posts, likes, search results and more.
For example, if you use Instagram in Japanese for the hashtag #klingonshodo, it will tell you that there are 投稿1,921件, or 1,921 posts under that hashtag. That’s less than this forum thread (2,800件), but considering they’re all by one guy and in the rather niche genre of Klingon-Japanese calligraphy, it’s still very impressive.
If you select this post, you’ll find that it says いいね！21件. This means that the post has 21 likes, or いいね:s. Which, frankly, is too few.
Kanji 8
総
Kun’yomi: す、すべ
On’yomi: そう
Meaning: general; whole; all; full; total
Etymology: 総 is a shinjitai (Japanese-specific) variant of the Traditional Chinese character 總.
總 is a phonosemantic compound. 糸 (rope, silk) gives the meaning, while 悤 gives the pronunciation.
In Chinese, one meaning of this character is “collect” or “gather”; according to Kanji Portraits, the original meaning was of weaving several threads together into one, which in turn gave the meaning of “every” or “total”.
The kun’yomi reading doesn’t seem to get much use, having been replaced with 全 (and even then, it’s often written using hiragana).
IfYouWaniBeMyKani: You are a sad man with a big nose (公). However, your big nose isn’t the reason you’re sad; you’re sad because you have a big heart (心). You see a large spider web (糸), which you know will catch every single fly in your house. It makes you soooooooooooooo sad, thinking of all the flies who will lose their lives.
You’d like to save each and every one of them, but then the spider and its young would die of starvation.
You can’t please everybody, and that’s why you’re sad, you big-hearted, big-nosed sad man.
Vocabulary:
総当たり (そうあたり)
round-robin; brute force; trying every possible combination
Right now, some desperate people are considering launching a 総当たり攻撃 (そうあたりこうげき) - a brute force attack - to reach B3; they want to set up a script to hit (当たる) every (総) possible password.
However, doing so will take soooo long. Ideally, we’d have several computers dedicated to this task at the same time.
How many computers? Every Atari that we can get our hands on!
This sort of brain-dead solution method is perfect for early computers; it’s soooo Atari.