ポイ捨て & ポイントメーク


Found in the voting page on engrishfunny.com:

Tabako no poisute kinshi

It was posted there because of the odd English translation, of course, but I was more interested in the Japanese: タバコのポイ捨て禁止!, or, for the kana-impaired, “Tabako no poisute kinshi!”.

The interesting bit is poisute, ポイ捨て = “littering”, for a literal translation of “cigarette littering prohibited”. The first half comes from the mimetic adverb poito = “carelessly”; the second half from the verb suteru = “to throw away”. Hadn’t run across poito before.

While looking it up, I came across an amusing loanword: ポイントメーク, pointomeiku. Care to guess the meaning?


point make(up) = "making up only parts of one's face instead of doing a full make-up job"