(no subject)

Earlier this week, I saw a NYT story on cosmetic surgery for female genitalia. Ick. I say unto you: Ick. But being of inquisitive mind and hearty constitution, I couldn't just leave it at "Ick".

What on earth do they *do*? What is the goal, here? Pilgrim, seek no further! (The Westfield Seek-No-Further is an heirloom variety of apple, a factoid I bet you didn't expect to find in the middle of this discussion.) Here are before and after pictures so that you can see what three to eight grand (cost of this sort of foolishness) purchases in the way of *ahem* neatening.

How am I supposed to feel about this? Let's try on some reactions, see how they look, twirl around in 'em in front of the mirror and see how big they make my ass look...

It's a step forward, women taking ownership of that they should be ashamed of* and making it more attractive to them. Huzzah? *sigh* No, okay, pretty much I'm not buying that. (*Confused? See here.)

It's brilliant marketing, selling something that (barring certain lines of work) will only be seen and/or appreciated by a very, very select audience.

It's kind of disturbing -- the "after" pictures look like they're... twelve? I guess it makes sense, the whole youth-is-sexy thing, and probably my view of things is somewhat warped by the shaved aspect. They'd look more like they belonged to adult women if they were furrier, maybe.

Kinda kills the whole orchid metaphor, doesn't it? They don't look very floral, neatened up like that, do they?

*sigh*

One final thought -- does anyone but me wonder about how this sort of foolishness meshes with laws on Female Genital Mutilation? I'm just asking... got an irony detector going off here, probably the damn thing's on the blink again.

(no subject)

I'm following with interest No-sword's foray into the wonderful world of Japanese 四字熟語 (pronounced yo-ji-juku-go, means four-character idiom). I first learned about these from the useful and always entertaining columns over at www.kanjiclinic.com, but had sort of forgotten about them as time went by.

Turns out, according to languagehat, that these are also a feature of Chinese. Who knew? And there was a bit of cultural clue that totally passed me by in the movie Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon... the damn title is one of those four-character idioms. I think my life needs more footnotes so that I don't miss out on this sort of interesting information.

I wanted to give all ya'll some samples of four-character idioms and I didn't want to use the ones carefully explained and set forth with helpful, easy-to-read English commentary from the sources above because you can go read them on your own time, so here's a big honking list of 四字熟語 (site in Japanese, explanations of compounds in Japanese, contains no English anywhere).

Some of them, like 七転八起 (fall seven times, get up eight), are pretty clear. One should grasp the general idea there pretty quickly. It'd make a good sentiment for a Motivational Poster for your workplace, if you wanted to encourage your cow orkers to flay you alive. Others, like 悪事千里, didn't strike me as all that informative. Literally, I got "evil deed, long way". What am I supposed to take from that? Fortunately, each entry in the above-linked resource for 四字熟語 has a line of explanation underneath the compound and its pronunciation. For 悪事千里, the explanation is 悪いことはどんなに隠してもたちまち評判になり、世間に知れ渡ってしまうということ。 My best-guess reading of the explanation is It is said that when someone tries to hide an evil deed, knowledge of his actions spreads throughout the world, instantly. -- so, evil deed, long way.

I don't think everything idiomatic or proverbish in Japanese is a four-character compound. They also appear to have regular proverbs or sayings, like 白猫であれ、黒猫であれ、ネズミを取るのが猫が良い猫だ。 (White cat, black cat -- any cat that catches mice is a good cat.) Here, you can match up some English proverbs with the corresponding Japanese versions of them. It's got answers, in case you suck at it as badly as I do.