Just a Smidge: Part 4
Friday, October 24th, 2008
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Today we’ll learn how to be pretentious in Japanese. If you’ve ever watched the show Frasier, you may have heard the character Niles order cappuccino with “just a whisper of cinnamon.” And if you saw the movie Sideways, you heard the wine snob protagonist refer to one red wine as having “the faintest soupçon of asparagus and just a flutter of a nutty Edam cheese.”
These characters used an important bit of syntax when they indicated “a touch of” or “a smidge.” How important? Well, it’s the difference between calling a movie Evil and A Touch of Evil.
In Japanese, 味 (MI, aji) enables you to indicate when something has just a hint of this or a touch of that. This kanji performs that function in the following words, where it means “sensation, feeling”:
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Posted by Eve Kushner in Kanji Curiosity | No Comments »
