Today, we were wishing a Japanese colleague happy birthday in our company group chat while are all working from home. My colleague replies with a message that was just 10 emoji ants. After some back and forth, I learned this was a pun since ありがとう is similar to 蟻が十 (there are 10 ants)
Apparently this is some pretty dated slang, though. But if their testimony is true, it will be pretty impressive if you whip this out in front of a Japanese friend.
Do you guys know of any other common or popular puns?
Because see, 笑 (also lol) can be abbreviated to “w” (for “warau”). And if you want to say “lololol”, you can say 笑笑笑笑笑, or wwwww. And wwwww looks like grass growing. Hence 草.
If the meaning is simply a word play, then “kunoichi” actually is (but it plays here with visual shapes, something common in kanji-realm, but of course quite uncommon on alphabet-realms).
If the meaning of “pun” is a word play restricted to same sounding words, then indeed it isn’t.
In the case of 草 for 笑, it combines both sound play and image play (trough romaji (w) )
