Got no brain today. Stayed in bed until right before Arcadia recording, got the recording done, and laid right back down. Not gonna nap because that's the devil talking but it is tempting
Sor and I are rainchecking Dungeon Meshi both for the above and because they have a meeting this evening that makes scheduling around it a little weird.
Might go out and get a little sun and see if that wakes me up
Hey!!
So some context: my dad grew up in Japan1, and one of the things he picked up while he was there, was a swear that he would use like "god damn it!" and that I have never been able to get a satisfying literal translation for -- it's not on any 'Japanese swears' lists or anything, and of course I didn't know how to spell it or how to break it down into its individual parts. Until now. I just realised a bit ago that I actually know what all of the individual parts mean and therefore can now translate it!
The swear is "dame yo deshou" (だめよでしょう). "Dame" means worthless or useless. "Yo" imparts information (used when you don't think the other person already has this information), and can be used as an emphatic particle that, like, imposes your opinion on the listener (a bit rude, basically saying 'this is how it is, you know!'). "Deshou" expresses almost-certainty ('I'm almost definitely right about this') -- so, altogether, だめよでしょう is an emphatic "[That's] [You're] [They're] [etc]2 useless!!"
What's funny is that "deshou" actually softens the whole thing a little and makes it more polite -- to be really rough about it you'd use "darou"
Anyway, I called my dad and shared all this with him and got some extra context that it seems he learned the word by breaking into someone's farm with a friend and chopping up some of their cabbages with a hatchet. So I don't know if the "god damn it!" use is actually the way a native would use it -- he did use it in front of some Japanese tourists on a family road trip once and got a reaction out of them, but you could as easily get a reaction by swearing in fluent Japanese as by shouting some nonsense syllables, so that doesn't actually mean much
But that's a mystery solved!
1He spent his childhood in Hawaii and then his adolescence in Japan
2Japanese is a pro-drop language and the subject of a sentence is often left to interpretation through context
Oh a bit more information relevant to the cabbages thing, "dame" can also be used to indicate that someone shouldn't be doing something (because it's a useless/worthless action) -- so in that instance it's a "You shouldn't be doing that!!"
We're approaching True Summer, when it stops cooling off at night, so that's, uhhhh,,,,, literally the opposite of cool,
Also my joints are super loose today
DAN: Was [the book you were reading] good?
ARIN: I haven't finished it.
DAN: Ah.
ARIN: I told you I was reading it, and then I just kinda stopped.
DAN: I was about to ask 'was it engaging' but I guess the answer can't be 100%
ARIN: Uh. Yeah, it was! It's super good
Truly spoken like a person without ADHD, Dan
No judgement to anyone who prefers dark mode, but are the people who go on and on about how light mode blinds them aware that they can change the brightness setting on their phones
