Hey folks! I was just hoping to get some help with the kanji 一体, which WK gives as meaning “the heck” or “in the world/on earth”. I get that’s an…exclamation, I suppose? Surprise? Sort of the ‘tf’ part of ‘wtf’? But something still isn’t quite clicking, so if anyone has a bit more info on it (examples, different ways of explaining, etc) I’d love to hear how everyone else understands this one.
I kind of like the example from Tae Kim’s guide, even though kana is used here:
Example 4
A: ごめん、明日は絶対駄目だ。
B: 明日は、いったいどうして駄目なのよ?!
A: Sorry, tomorrow is no good for certain.
B: Just why in the world is tomorrow no good?! (explicit demand for explanation)
This example from Jisho is also decent:
一体どこで彼に会ったんだ。
Where on earth did you meet him?
一体 appears very often in anime and manga, exactly as a “the hell” adverb to demand explanation or ridicule a poor excuse in sentences like “Like hell you did a good job”. It also plays well with the なの grammar structure to express expectation / request explanation.
It literally translates as ‘one body’. I interpret it as something like an evolution of ‘altogether’. You might say ‘that’s altogether impossible’, right? Same sort of ‘emphasis’ nuance here: ‘how in the world/all things considered/even if I look at the overall picture,…’. I’m being very liberal with my translations here, and they may not actually be accurate, but I’m trying to express how you might transition from ‘the whole’ to an idea like ‘what the heck?’.
It’s used as an adverb which expresses the speaker’s incredulity towards the situation.
Here’s a dramatic example from weblio:
一体君は何者だ
“Just who the heck are you?”
Could definitely see this in a drama or anime where the villain is monsterous or very powerful.
(Also nitpicky but 一体 is a word composed of two kanji, and is not itself a kanji)