“Ooo! A police car
is following us!” exclaims
my child, gleefully.
I feel you there.
Tangential personal anecdote
英語だよ!is a familiar phrase from my time in Japan. This has happened with (among others)
シトラス - citrus
ウルフ - wolf
ツイスト - twist,
and my personal favorite, ホン コール - えぇ? 本凍る???..oh, a PHONE CALL, Jesus,
and my confusion was always met with an insistent “英語だよ! 英語!”
I wonder if it was a child that announce the following or the spouse? I interpreted it as the spouse or other passenger saying it, and the child/children getting excited, but it totally works (probably better) with the children saying it, too.
ぱとかーがついてくるよとこははしゃぎ
“Wow! A police car / just to escort us!” squeals / my excited kid
Maybe the choice of the word “squeals” is overwrought, but it fits with the mood of 燥ぐ to get me to the all consuming 5-7-5 objective. Well, that’s my excuse…
A classic attack of カタンギリス (Katakana English), wherein the English word is written down in kana and then pronounced in kana, causing the English speaking listener much consternation. The worst such confusion I had was with 「シドニー」 when I heard it the first time. After a couple of attempts at getting through to me verbally, the speaker wrote it down in English and I was like, “She-doe-knee= Sydney? なるほどね!!” I was pushed into a deep meditative state as my mind went blank before he wrote it down. A very powerful koan, it was.
The Japanese can sometimes seem so mysterious in their choice of words and names. Who else would think of saying「サボ」 for skipping classes? Not to mention the kind of nonsense phrases that adorn t-shirts… But, I suppose that’s also the charm of Japan…
Here are the links to the 356 Japanese originals (spoiler free) and to the the spreadsheet with all the upcoming senryu as well as the translations to date.
TiL that this word has a fascinating history. Obviously, it’s a French word for Dutch footwear that came to Japan via English due to a French railway strike in 1910. Not sure why I didn’t intuit this immediately.
I’d heard the word before but it never dawned on me that “sabotage” and “slipshod” were at all related, much less “ciabatta”!
This was the part that was confusing me most about this one. I was like, “Are they…making toast speeches at some kid’s birthday?..Is a kid giving a long speech?”
I’m so happy that people seem to be enjoying these as much as I am.
It’s not making it any easier to pick a winner, though, especially with the number that have even accomplished 5-7-5 in English recently!
I’m still going to try to select just a single translation every morning. I think it’s worth it for future readers of the complete list. Maintaining the links to each day’s discussion with all the entries makes me feel better about this decision.
Hopefully, I can just count the likes when there are two excellent submissions like this (so far).
Here are the links to the 356 Japanese originals (spoiler free) and to the the spreadsheet with all the upcoming senryu as well as the translations to date.
That’s close but slightly different to my understanding (which likely means we are both wrong, of course ).
Here’s how I parse it:
帰りぎわ - on the brink of returning home / as I was about to leave
とらなきゃ - equivalent to 取らないといけない = I must pick up
よかったこの - I think this means “(something) I was happy for” here. The の is important.
Future me: No it’s not, you idiot. It’s just the second half of the word この. Somehow my eyes just completely glossed over the こ. You were exactly right: 取らなきゃよかった means “I wish I hadn’t picked up” or, more precisely, “it would have been better if I hadn’t picked up.”
電話 - telephone call (in this case, the “something” above).
So I think it means something like “Fortunately, I received a phone call I had to take just I was about to return home.”
That is, I think the implication is he wasn’t looking forward to returning home.