Broken Tattoos: Ariana Grande vs. James Aspey.
04 February 2019 [link youtube]
Tattoos by illiterates, for illiterates: the problem here is NOT cultural appropriation… and no, this is not the first time I've used my (limited!) ability in Chinese and Japanese to question the meaning (or meaninglessness) of other people's tattoos… I understand that it creates a lot of… uh… friction?
For a strictly Japanese perspective on the translation of Arianna's "corrected" tattoo being "even worse" (perhaps "a small BBQ grilled finger") see: アリアナグランデが変な日本語の刺青を見て爆笑した！！！ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWR0Vv_my_8
If you want to find me on Patreon, here I am: https://www.patreon.com/a_bas_le_ciel/
I have a separate, "serious" channel (for videos… uh… more serious than this?), and you can find it here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCP3fLeOekX2yBegj9-XwDhA/videos
Youtube Automatic Transcription
you know look what makes it tragic what
makes it laughable is that you know these people are reaching out for something meaningful they want something profoundly meaningful written on their skin to be with them to carry with them on their skin until the day they die I understand the desire the yearning in their hearts for something profound and philosophical when they walk into the tattoo shop and what do they get these people are putting a lot of money on the table and they're not even getting the Chinese equivalent of a quotation from Shakespeare they are getting complete nonsense and they become walking billboards for an old saying from Socrates the unexamined life is not worth living we all make bad decisions in life that's your hand that is your hand are you gonna wear a glove for the rest of your life in public ariana grande the story is not about cultural appropriation I have just made a quick survey of news websites and they all seem to want to make this story about cultural appropriation and it's not if someone in Japan wanted to get a tattoo with a quotation from Hamlet in English Hamlet if you haven't heard of it hit play by this young kid William Shakespeare he's going he's going places doesn't Hamlet itself in case you didn't know it's not really English culture Hamlet Prince of Denmark hashtag cultural appropriation okay this bunch of like English people English and Scottish people were ripping off Danish culture when Shakespeare wrote Hamlet okay it's fine if someone in Japan went and wanted to get a quotation from Shakespeare tattooed on their hand Westerners native English speakers would sympathize but if they came back and that tattoo was so horribly misspelled if there were just like grammar errors and spelling errors in every word and like sometimes you looking like what what is that word supposed to be think of how badly you would feel for them and you'd asked like like let's say you're looking at look sometimes you'd like on a letter by letter pasted up is that supposed to be the letter e and you realize the tattoo artist the tattoo artist did not have basic literacy in English did not have basic competence to do this that today in 2019 is what we see again and again and again with both Chinese and Japanese tattoos that white Western people pay for and guys the main victims are the rich that's the strangest irony of all so like ariana grande your body is on the line your reputation is on the line you are a no-talent bum who makes your living showing off the skin of your body and you are writing this on your body in ink forever there is no eraser for that there is no takey backsies right you could afford to fly to Japan and get an actual Japanese person to do this tattoo no questions you could fly to Taiwan and have it done in bite by up someone who's a native speaker of Chinese who's probably very good at Chinese calligraphy whether you want Chinese or Japanese and by the way in Hong Kong especially there's a lot of both Chinese and Japanese tattoo artists for interesting political reasons a lot of the Japanese gangsters criminal element get their get their tattoos done in Hong Kong rather than in Japan so it's actually quite a booming little industry there ok ariana grande you have options you have many different choices you can make and you disastrously made the wrong one now the particular text of this tattoo when you really break it down it's actually much worse than what anyone has said in the press that I obviously haven't read every single newspaper article but you know it is most of the the white Western english-speaking press is derivative people aren't really doing original research or original thinking um the the key word here that everyone is translating as ring does not really mean ring so again these are really Chinese characters they're Chinese words and then they have particular usage within Japanese the languages the written languages are linked they overlap they're two separate spoken languages but they really overlap in writing and this is written in Chinese there's not a single Japanese character here right not a single distinctively Japanese character here the word here Lunn Lunn zhadalan LUN it's an incredibly broad vague word for to go around so you really looking at this straight up with no foreknowledge of what it's supposed to say it looks like a really bad sex joke it looks like some kind of sexual innuendo cuz it's like seven fingers go around and then the heart like seven fingers take your turn like it seems like it's trying to hint it something like that is some kind of like dirty double entendre and again the heart doesn't help right you're reading it that way top to bottom now it's true you can kind of sort of force yourself like if you know what it's supposed to be in Japanese to look at it that way in Japanese you can take this and put it into Google Translate and come up with some hilarious results people are saying oh it still means like seven finger barbecue grill and stuff like um you know the simplest truth is that it really means nothing at all but yeah seven fingers go around seven fingers take a turn it is an absolute disaster oh you could have blame who are you going to blame this is now a mass phenomenon look I'm moving on to my second example here which is vegan leader James ass bee but I've had contact this phenomenon for for decades and decades of my life I used to be a scholar of Buddhism and a lot of people would get Buddhist tattoos and we a lot of you guys don't realize is that Buddhism involves internal cultural appropriation the same way Shakespeare does some of Shakespeare's plays are in Venice some of them are set in Scotland Somerset Denmark there were elements of the exotic within Shakespeare well guess what you know people in Thailand want to get tattoos in Pali which is an ancient language from India written in medieval Cambodian right or Renaissance Cambodian everyone describe that period of time so there's there are levels of illiteracy there where the customer doesn't really read or understand what they're getting and the tattoo artists probably and one of the most common things to see was the actual name of the Buddha then the word Buddha misspelled in Buddhist tattoos Thailand Laos Cambodia all around you you'd see this definites like that's written on your body forever and sure a lot of the time also just complete nonsense being written on tattoos and because of celebrity angelina jolie angelina jolie got a series of cambodian polly tattoos that's the ancient buddhist tradition that comes from India via Sri Lanka to Cambodia on to Angelina Jolie's asks all these white people were paying for vacations mostly in Thailand and then we're trying to get Kim medieval cambodian style tattoos occasionally low Chenery san style and I was seeing this go on so look again the fundamental problem here is not cultural appropriation the fundamental problem is stupidity and maybe we find that harder to deal with so look James ass B I have one female friend who is highly educated and has a ph.d and reads philosophy and whenever I showed her this I was like can you believe these tattoos when she she just write back saying uh-oh I'm looking at these pictures and it doesn't have that kind of effect I immediately go I'm getting turned on look at these pictures of just like you were an intelligent educated woman how can you find him attractive just given what the nature of the conversation we're having here I I honestly I cannot find ariana grande attractive it's I'm constitutionally incapable of being attracted to Ariana Grande and you know the illiterate garbage written on her hand doesn't help okay this is James ass P this guy you know he's like the male vegan equivalent to Ariana Grande except he only has one song and every single one of his concerts he sings it again and again again his song is he used to be a drug addict he used to have no direction and no meaning in his life and then he discovered veganism and now he's basically like a spiritual preacher for veganism so guys um what's mind-blowing to me about this tattoo is both when you take all the words together it is completely meaningless and when I show dative speakers of Chinese this the vast majority them were not willing to even say anything more they found it so mind-boggling like it was just such complete gobbledygook they just say no I have no car I have no idea what it's trying to like don't even ask me I don't even want to look at it this is just garbage look this is just completely incoherent nonsense like it had this effect on the more they found it kind of shocking the tells you something of the way Chinese works like if it's a little bit wrong it's totally incomprehensible but even just stop and look at a character by character this was a lot of work for me to figure out the the penultimate character here just take a moment to look at that a got here circled for you in blue brush stroke by brushstroke it seems like the tattoo artists just didn't have the attention span like yeah this kind of sort of resembles the character but not really no no like it's just it's just wrong like it's just not correct and it get most native Chinese speakers when I show them that in isolation they did they couldn't even guess they did like they were just like dude I have no idea what that supposed to be so it's a little bit wrong it is all the way wrong Sinjin huh okay huh is the most common word in the Chinese language and it's also one of the simplest and easiest to write it is it is the word meaning and this and that the equivalent of and in English so if you've been studying Chinese for just one week you've learned this word and you've seen it's worth a lot it is among the most common characters and even this if you just take a moment to look at it brush stroke by brush stroke it's like the tattoo artist just kind of wasn't paying attention and ran out how did you screw this up how did you get the word and wrong in the middle of this dudes chest and he's like Angelina sorry he's like Angelina Jolie he's like Angelina Jolie he's like ariana grande he makes his living going around topless showing off his skin it's hard to say who is this more true of Angelina Jolie ariana grande they all are no talent bums who show off their bodies for their living and you're managing to screw this up you think they're ruined it's the only asset you've got going for you sorry this guy does not get by on having a great voice or dancing skills shout out to James ass P but nobody's showing up to hear you speak for that okay he is scraping by and his looks and a lot of it is him finding any excuse to take off his shirt and show off his chest and do chin-ups yeah yeah yeah this guy is basically a softcore porn Instagram and whatever Hey look I get fan mail some women some women find this YouTube channel erotic okay I mean that's you know we can yeah we can do some psychological examination of I'd like to think it's a higher quality of person who masturbates watching a ballast yell that you I'd like to think that but maybe they're the most depraved individuals of all okay so look character by character image again and wrong and then even this one here so the the wrong if you just look look at the bottom half of it you see there's a line missing and that is again that is one of absolutely the most common glyphs or symbols within Chinese as a separate word that means tree it's the tree radical you know look what makes it tragic what makes it laughable is that you know these people are reaching out for something meaningful they want something profoundly meaningful written on their skin to be with them to carry with them on their skin until the day they die I understand the desire the yearning in their hearts for something profound and philosophical when they walk into the tattoo shop and what do they get these people are putting a lot of money on the table and they're not even the Chinese equivalent of a quotation from Shakespeare they are getting complete nonsense and they become walking billboards for an old saying from Socrates the unexamined life is not worth living guys there's a link below this channel [Music]
makes it laughable is that you know these people are reaching out for something meaningful they want something profoundly meaningful written on their skin to be with them to carry with them on their skin until the day they die I understand the desire the yearning in their hearts for something profound and philosophical when they walk into the tattoo shop and what do they get these people are putting a lot of money on the table and they're not even getting the Chinese equivalent of a quotation from Shakespeare they are getting complete nonsense and they become walking billboards for an old saying from Socrates the unexamined life is not worth living we all make bad decisions in life that's your hand that is your hand are you gonna wear a glove for the rest of your life in public ariana grande the story is not about cultural appropriation I have just made a quick survey of news websites and they all seem to want to make this story about cultural appropriation and it's not if someone in Japan wanted to get a tattoo with a quotation from Hamlet in English Hamlet if you haven't heard of it hit play by this young kid William Shakespeare he's going he's going places doesn't Hamlet itself in case you didn't know it's not really English culture Hamlet Prince of Denmark hashtag cultural appropriation okay this bunch of like English people English and Scottish people were ripping off Danish culture when Shakespeare wrote Hamlet okay it's fine if someone in Japan went and wanted to get a quotation from Shakespeare tattooed on their hand Westerners native English speakers would sympathize but if they came back and that tattoo was so horribly misspelled if there were just like grammar errors and spelling errors in every word and like sometimes you looking like what what is that word supposed to be think of how badly you would feel for them and you'd asked like like let's say you're looking at look sometimes you'd like on a letter by letter pasted up is that supposed to be the letter e and you realize the tattoo artist the tattoo artist did not have basic literacy in English did not have basic competence to do this that today in 2019 is what we see again and again and again with both Chinese and Japanese tattoos that white Western people pay for and guys the main victims are the rich that's the strangest irony of all so like ariana grande your body is on the line your reputation is on the line you are a no-talent bum who makes your living showing off the skin of your body and you are writing this on your body in ink forever there is no eraser for that there is no takey backsies right you could afford to fly to Japan and get an actual Japanese person to do this tattoo no questions you could fly to Taiwan and have it done in bite by up someone who's a native speaker of Chinese who's probably very good at Chinese calligraphy whether you want Chinese or Japanese and by the way in Hong Kong especially there's a lot of both Chinese and Japanese tattoo artists for interesting political reasons a lot of the Japanese gangsters criminal element get their get their tattoos done in Hong Kong rather than in Japan so it's actually quite a booming little industry there ok ariana grande you have options you have many different choices you can make and you disastrously made the wrong one now the particular text of this tattoo when you really break it down it's actually much worse than what anyone has said in the press that I obviously haven't read every single newspaper article but you know it is most of the the white Western english-speaking press is derivative people aren't really doing original research or original thinking um the the key word here that everyone is translating as ring does not really mean ring so again these are really Chinese characters they're Chinese words and then they have particular usage within Japanese the languages the written languages are linked they overlap they're two separate spoken languages but they really overlap in writing and this is written in Chinese there's not a single Japanese character here right not a single distinctively Japanese character here the word here Lunn Lunn zhadalan LUN it's an incredibly broad vague word for to go around so you really looking at this straight up with no foreknowledge of what it's supposed to say it looks like a really bad sex joke it looks like some kind of sexual innuendo cuz it's like seven fingers go around and then the heart like seven fingers take your turn like it seems like it's trying to hint it something like that is some kind of like dirty double entendre and again the heart doesn't help right you're reading it that way top to bottom now it's true you can kind of sort of force yourself like if you know what it's supposed to be in Japanese to look at it that way in Japanese you can take this and put it into Google Translate and come up with some hilarious results people are saying oh it still means like seven finger barbecue grill and stuff like um you know the simplest truth is that it really means nothing at all but yeah seven fingers go around seven fingers take a turn it is an absolute disaster oh you could have blame who are you going to blame this is now a mass phenomenon look I'm moving on to my second example here which is vegan leader James ass bee but I've had contact this phenomenon for for decades and decades of my life I used to be a scholar of Buddhism and a lot of people would get Buddhist tattoos and we a lot of you guys don't realize is that Buddhism involves internal cultural appropriation the same way Shakespeare does some of Shakespeare's plays are in Venice some of them are set in Scotland Somerset Denmark there were elements of the exotic within Shakespeare well guess what you know people in Thailand want to get tattoos in Pali which is an ancient language from India written in medieval Cambodian right or Renaissance Cambodian everyone describe that period of time so there's there are levels of illiteracy there where the customer doesn't really read or understand what they're getting and the tattoo artists probably and one of the most common things to see was the actual name of the Buddha then the word Buddha misspelled in Buddhist tattoos Thailand Laos Cambodia all around you you'd see this definites like that's written on your body forever and sure a lot of the time also just complete nonsense being written on tattoos and because of celebrity angelina jolie angelina jolie got a series of cambodian polly tattoos that's the ancient buddhist tradition that comes from India via Sri Lanka to Cambodia on to Angelina Jolie's asks all these white people were paying for vacations mostly in Thailand and then we're trying to get Kim medieval cambodian style tattoos occasionally low Chenery san style and I was seeing this go on so look again the fundamental problem here is not cultural appropriation the fundamental problem is stupidity and maybe we find that harder to deal with so look James ass B I have one female friend who is highly educated and has a ph.d and reads philosophy and whenever I showed her this I was like can you believe these tattoos when she she just write back saying uh-oh I'm looking at these pictures and it doesn't have that kind of effect I immediately go I'm getting turned on look at these pictures of just like you were an intelligent educated woman how can you find him attractive just given what the nature of the conversation we're having here I I honestly I cannot find ariana grande attractive it's I'm constitutionally incapable of being attracted to Ariana Grande and you know the illiterate garbage written on her hand doesn't help okay this is James ass P this guy you know he's like the male vegan equivalent to Ariana Grande except he only has one song and every single one of his concerts he sings it again and again again his song is he used to be a drug addict he used to have no direction and no meaning in his life and then he discovered veganism and now he's basically like a spiritual preacher for veganism so guys um what's mind-blowing to me about this tattoo is both when you take all the words together it is completely meaningless and when I show dative speakers of Chinese this the vast majority them were not willing to even say anything more they found it so mind-boggling like it was just such complete gobbledygook they just say no I have no car I have no idea what it's trying to like don't even ask me I don't even want to look at it this is just garbage look this is just completely incoherent nonsense like it had this effect on the more they found it kind of shocking the tells you something of the way Chinese works like if it's a little bit wrong it's totally incomprehensible but even just stop and look at a character by character this was a lot of work for me to figure out the the penultimate character here just take a moment to look at that a got here circled for you in blue brush stroke by brushstroke it seems like the tattoo artists just didn't have the attention span like yeah this kind of sort of resembles the character but not really no no like it's just it's just wrong like it's just not correct and it get most native Chinese speakers when I show them that in isolation they did they couldn't even guess they did like they were just like dude I have no idea what that supposed to be so it's a little bit wrong it is all the way wrong Sinjin huh okay huh is the most common word in the Chinese language and it's also one of the simplest and easiest to write it is it is the word meaning and this and that the equivalent of and in English so if you've been studying Chinese for just one week you've learned this word and you've seen it's worth a lot it is among the most common characters and even this if you just take a moment to look at it brush stroke by brush stroke it's like the tattoo artist just kind of wasn't paying attention and ran out how did you screw this up how did you get the word and wrong in the middle of this dudes chest and he's like Angelina sorry he's like Angelina Jolie he's like Angelina Jolie he's like ariana grande he makes his living going around topless showing off his skin it's hard to say who is this more true of Angelina Jolie ariana grande they all are no talent bums who show off their bodies for their living and you're managing to screw this up you think they're ruined it's the only asset you've got going for you sorry this guy does not get by on having a great voice or dancing skills shout out to James ass P but nobody's showing up to hear you speak for that okay he is scraping by and his looks and a lot of it is him finding any excuse to take off his shirt and show off his chest and do chin-ups yeah yeah yeah this guy is basically a softcore porn Instagram and whatever Hey look I get fan mail some women some women find this YouTube channel erotic okay I mean that's you know we can yeah we can do some psychological examination of I'd like to think it's a higher quality of person who masturbates watching a ballast yell that you I'd like to think that but maybe they're the most depraved individuals of all okay so look character by character image again and wrong and then even this one here so the the wrong if you just look look at the bottom half of it you see there's a line missing and that is again that is one of absolutely the most common glyphs or symbols within Chinese as a separate word that means tree it's the tree radical you know look what makes it tragic what makes it laughable is that you know these people are reaching out for something meaningful they want something profoundly meaningful written on their skin to be with them to carry with them on their skin until the day they die I understand the desire the yearning in their hearts for something profound and philosophical when they walk into the tattoo shop and what do they get these people are putting a lot of money on the table and they're not even the Chinese equivalent of a quotation from Shakespeare they are getting complete nonsense and they become walking billboards for an old saying from Socrates the unexamined life is not worth living guys there's a link below this channel [Music]