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More than twenty years ago, I had fun tracing a similar phenomenon: English “proverbs” that appeared in English dictionaries and textbooks published in Japan bu
by tkgally 1y ago
More than twenty years ago, I had fun tracing a similar phenomenon: English “proverbs” that appeared in English dictionaries and textbooks published in Japan but that did not seem to have any actual currency in English. It became clear that they had been copied from dictionary to dictionary for decades before large-scale corpora and search engines made it possible to check actual usage.
“Every man has his humo(u)r.”
https://www.gally.net/leavings/00/0001.html https://www.gally.net/leavings/00/0001.html
“Losers are always in the wrong.”
https://www.gally.net/leavings/00/0098.html https://www.gally.net/leavings/00/0098.html
In their heyday, dozens of English-Japanese dictionaries were published in Japan:
https://www.gally.net/leavings/00/0005.html https://www.gally.net/leavings/00/0005.html
Producing an original dictionary from scratch would have been expensive and time consuming, so most publishers borrowed liberally from each other.
- Izkata 1y ago> “Every man has his humo(u)r.” I think this is the likely origin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Every_Man_in_His_Humour https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Every_Man_in_His_Humour But I think I've also heard the "has" phrasing as a pun on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humorism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humorism
- floren 1y agoIf you haven't come across "English as She Is Spoke" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_as_She_Is_Spoke https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_as_She_Is_Spoke), your proverbs remind me of that. Craunch the marmoset!
- javawizard 1y agoI remember running across a shirt for sale in Japan that said: Free is free Shit is shit Damn I don't know what it was about that particular sequence of words but man if it didn't get me something good.
- tkgally 1y agoThat definitely deserves proverb status! Around the same time I was collecting those ghost proverbs, I spent a pleasant afternoon in Shinjuku, Tokyo, taking pictures of T-shirts: https://www.gally.net/tshirts/index.html https://www.gally.net/tshirts/index.html
- pavel_lishin 1y agoOne of the things I'm looking forward to most is traveling to Japan, and maybe other parts of eastern Asia, and collecting a ridiculous amount of nonsensical t-shirts to ship back home.
- thrashwerk 1y ago“Losers are always in the wrong.” sounds like "History is written by the victors." just from a different PoV.