Friday, November 28, 2008

"celebrate the knowledge of a dangerous, crazy father"

    Reader Kat has emailed me yesterday this photo of her husband's back:

    tattoo_shi1shou4wei1kuang2fu4

    He got it done four years ago and the characters should be Knowledge, Loyalty, Courage, Warrior, & Father.

    Since Alan just got back from Japan, I forwarded this to him. Here is what Alan concludes:

    Besides the terrible calligraphy, the character is missing a dot at the upper right-hand corner. Also, the stroke at the bottom center of 寿 is supposed to be a separate dot rather than the incorrect connected stroke pointing down and to the right that we see.

    Anyway, the characters mean roughly as follows:
    knowledge, consciousness
    寿 congratulations, celebration, long life, sushi
    danger, dangerous
    crazy, insane, mad
    father

    Is this supposed to mean "celebrate the knowledge of a dangerous, crazy father" or something?

    I don't get the whole picture but it doesn't sound very complementary to the "father." The characters do not seem to mean anything like they think they do.

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