Master of Stupidity
Roddy from Chinese Forums tipped me about an user "insanejester" on his forum wanting to get a Chinese tattoo for his 18th birthday.
The photo shown above is what the young man finally got.
It means "idiot".
呆 = dull; dull-minded, simple, stupid
子 = offspring, child; fruit, seed of; 1st terrestrial branch
posted by tian at
1:59 PM
9 Comments:
oh, why choose this as a birthday tatto...
;-_-
why not?
what would you have chosen?
Yeah, I mean, the guy's handle is "InsaneJester". Clearly he's not trying to project a sober and intellectual image to the world. I'm sure he got this quite intentionally, putting this in a totally different category as the rest of the stuff here.
呆子 simply sounds like a name for girls since it's quite
common for girls' name to have 子 at the end. 呆子 should
mean "DumbGirl", "Ms.Dummy". Although I am not quite sure
about the reaction Chinese ppl would show, I have to say
Japanese would be truly surprised at somebody having such a
tatoo.
狂師(insane teacher/person/professional) would have been
much better.
It's true that Japanese girls' names often end in 子, but 呆子 is a Chinese WORD. It means "fool". Again, I'm sure that InsaneJester chose this knowing exactly what it meant, and probably doesn't care if his Chinese tattoo is misunderstood by people who speak a different language, like Japanese.
Of course the issue of whether you want "fool" tattooed on yourself is totally separate. (I wouldn't, sure.) But as far as Chinese character usage goes, I think he's doing fine.
If you can't get that tattoo removed, one way you can do damage control is to add two more strokes to the first character to make "保". Then your tattoo would mean "protect child".
How about 保存, which means to conserve? You could even add a noun after it.
Very funny! But, Tian, might you please consider including the pinyin for characters, to aid the learning of beginner mei guo ren xue sheng students of Chinese? I think your site is wonderful, and would be most grateful for pinyin following correct characters, as I'm sure others would be.
Xie xie!
Thanks Anonymous, I will definitely take your suggestion under consideration.
In the meantime, you can get all the information of each character by click on it, which it will lead you to Unihan database.
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