“Hey, kid, say hi to Joe the Plumber for me…”

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The folks at Boboli have a new line of flatbreads under the Ambretta label. I picked some up at Safeway last night, and this morning’s breakfast consisted of their rosemary flatbread, toasted and combined with roast beef and cheddar cheese into traditional sandwich form. The house now smells like rosemary and butter, which is never a bad thing.

The only email spam I read is the stuff that arrives in Japanese. Every once in a while I’m tempted to print one out and take it into my reading class, but so far I’ve resisted. I’m trying to avoid the “creepy older guy on campus” image.

My English spam seems to focus around filter-evading euphemisms for chemically-induced potency and larger body parts, but the stuff I get in Japanese is about 90% “come to our site if you want to meet women”. The pitch varies from week to week, and the current one is hilarious: 逆援助.

Literally, gyaku-enjo would be “reverse support”, but enjo means something special in the minds of Japanese men: enjo-kousai, which can be translated as either “subsidized dating” or “schoolgirl prostitution”, depending on your mood.

Reverse enjo, then, is every struggling salaryman’s dream: beautiful younger women who’ll pay you for sex. Keep the dream alive, guys.

All the J-E dictionaries I’ve checked either insist or at least imply that the suffix -darake (“full of ~; covered with ~”) always has a negative meaning. Certainly the vast majority of uses are negative, but the reason I looked it up in the first place was a clearly positive example, an illustrated guide to the Imperial Japanese Army called ドキッ乙女だらけの帝國陸軍入門 (literally, “exciting filled-with-maidens imperial army introduction”).

It came up in class this week in one of the standard examples, 血だらけ, “covered in blood”. Mud, idiots, lies, mistakes, demons, and holes are also very commonly used with this suffix, but a quick search of Amazon Japan turns up book titles featuring cats, dreams, cat stickers, angels, women, haiku, mysteries, riddles, and, in the adult DVD section, a variety of special-interest items.

So, usually negative, but can be positive in anything from children’s books to fetish porn.

Here’s what the election comes down to, says The New Yorker in a current piece labeled as humor:

To put them in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. “Can I interest you in the chicken?” she asks. “Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?”

Now I really want Obama to lose, so his followers will choke to death on their own hatred, intolerance, and bigotry.

The hot news in the idol world is that Hello!Project has announced the “graduation” of every member over the age of 22. Some of them have outside careers that have been providing most of their work for a while (Yuuko Nakazawa, Mari Yaguchi, Mai Satoda, Miki Fujimoto), two of them were semi-retired into motherhood (Kaori Iida, Nozomi Tsuji), two of them were just spun off into their own, hideously-dressed (even by H!P standards) group that will be part of H!P’s parent agency (Rika Ishikawa, Hitomi Yoshizawa), and as I mentioned yesterday, the only one of the grown-ups they were actively promoting just turned up in Hollywood (Natsumi Abe).

The other fifteen or so? Pretty much doomed. Not only are most of them poorly-equipped for solo careers, but the agency owns their music, image, band names, and every picture taken of them since about age 14. No more fan club, no more merchandise, no more occasional appearances to remind fans that they exist, etc.

The oldest remaining member is just-turned-22 Ai Takahashi, who by a strange coincidence just got a lead role in a tv drama series. Good call, Ai-chan; this is not a good time to rest on your laurelsgiant pile of photobooks.

[Correction from the comments: “かく語りき is bungo forこう語った or こういうふうに語った”, where bungo = “literary language; formal (or archaic) written style based on Heian-period Japanese”. So, “thus spoke X” is actually probably the best English for it. Thanks, Thomas.]

Here’s today’s stumper, blogged for the benefit of anyone who runs across the phrase 「かく語りき」 (“kakukatariki”), usually in the form 「○○はかく語りき」. It’s not in your dictionary. It’s not in my dictionary. It’s not in the Tanaka Corpus. It’s all over Japanese web pages. Google for it with a variety of whitespace options, and 99% of what you find will be references to the game Xenosaga Episode III: Also Sprach Zarathustra, where it’s used in the subtitle as the Japanese translation of “also sprach”.

This suggests that it means “thus spoke X”, a deliberately archaic way of saying “X said”. But can you trust the translation of a video-game title, in a country where “Life, The Universe, and Everything” becomes “The Great Space Cricket War”? After about two hours of digging, I can report that the answer is “yes”.

After more than a dozen false leads, I found the answer in Google Book Search. According to Hepburn’s 1886 Japanese-English dictionary:

Ki　キ　A contraction of keri, used as a pret. suffix to verbs, also to mark a pause or end of a sentence: katariki, said; ...

Not being a true grammarian, I also had to look up “pret.” = preterite = “past tense”. かく is “to write” (see correction above), 語る is “to say”, and you put them together with a past-tense verb ending that was current 120 years ago, for “Here are written the words of X”.

Where did I find it? In the book ちっちゃい矢口真里のでっかいあなたに会いに行くのだ‼ (loosely “Incredibly Tiny Mari Yaguchi’s Giant Interviews!”, literally “It’s Super-chibi Mari Yaguchi’s going out to meet giant you!”). She’s chatting with veteran television actor Masatou Ibu, her co-star from the daily drama series Sentou no Musume!?, and the phrase appears as a section header when their conversation turns to his advice on acting.

Here’s a picture of them from the book:

I’m once again transcribing written pieces for use in my reading class, and I keep coming across little nuggets of information that I thought I’d gather in one place.

1. Mac Word has two completely separate editing modes, English and Japanese. You can use either language in both modes, but some behaviors differ, and documents originally created in Japanese mode will show their heritage on other, non-Japanese-enabled computers.
2. Switching between them not only requires restarting Word, but locating the "Microsoft Language Register" application inside the Office folder. In Office 2004, you drag the Word icon onto the Register; in 2008, you run it like any other app.
3. In Office 2004, it will always switch you into Kotoeri input mode when you launch Word. Also, installing updates will revert you to English mode.
4. In both, it will change your default settings, including margins, preferred units, and paper size (A4). Once you override these, it doesn't screw them up again.
5. The two most obviously important features you get out of Japanese mode are vertical text (in the Format/Document and Format/Text Direction menus) and furigana (in the Format/Phonetic Guide menu).
6. Do not attempt to type or edit in vertical-text mode; it's like watching paint dry. You can switch back and forth with the convenient Change Text Direction button on the toolbar, or switch to Draft view to edit.
7. Furigana isn't on the standard toolbar. You can open the Extended Formatting toolbar, or bind a key to the FormatPhoneticGuide command (I use Control-Option-P).
8. Don't add furigana until you think you're done with all other editing. The font and size of the furigana are set when they're created (font used for base word, half its size), and words that have been glossed can't be searched for. They're now equations, you see.
9. When you add furigana, Word often supplies the correct kana. If it doesn't know the word, or can't guess the correct reading when you're glossing only the kanji, it will usually default to the first on-reading for each character, but will sometimes just give up. Keep an online dictionary handy, and cut-and-paste between the two windows.
10. Particularly for vertical text, line and page breaks can be very tricky to control. There are two places to tinker: in the Format/Documents menu on the Document Grid panel, and in the Format/Paragraph menu on the "Indents and Spacing" and "Japanese Typography" panels (including the Options window). My usual settings:
    • On: No grid
    • Indentation, Special=First line,14pt (for normal paragraph indents)
    • Spacing, Before=0, After=0, Line spacing=At least,24pt
    • On: Don't add space between paragraphs of the same style
    • Off: Snap to grid when document grid is defined.
    • On: Allow hanging punctuation
    • Off: Allow punctuation at the start of the line to compress (I wish this also suppressed compression of kana at the start of the line...)
    • On: Compress punctuation and Japanese kana (that is, use proportional spacing)
11. For stories, I set the top and bottom margins to 0.75in, and the left and right to 0.5in. That leaves room for headers and footers, which are always printed horizontally.
12. Word's default Japanese font is MS Mincho, which is actually quite nice, but I prefer Apple's Hiragino Mincho at 14pt. I think it's a bit easier for students to make out all of the strokes, and using 14pt sets the default furigana size to 7pt, which is also easier to read.
13. Don't manually select a heavier weight of a kanji font to get bold text; it might work, it might not, and it might appear to work until you print. Just hit the bold button.
14. Always print to PDF, and always check the results out in Preview before really printing. Take particular note of things like vanishing bold text, unexpected compression of character spacing, and punctuation characters that didn't rotate correctly for vertical layout.
15. Specifically: “ ” … : ⁉ ‼ ⁈ ⁇ (and maybe a few others I haven't found yet). For most of these, Word has simply used the Latin font, and you can just force it to use the kanji font. For the quotes, you need to switch from the usual Western style (“”) to the fullwidth straight style with the close at the bottom (〝〟). For the ques-bang combos, though, you can either give up, or insert a very small inline horizontal text box into the column that contains the correct character. Be sure to drag that text box off to your scrapbook for later reuse.
16. Also, Word regularly hoses page numbering when printing; this seems to be tied to the "quick preview" in the print dialog, so wait for it to finish.

More as I’m reminded of them…