Let the pretending to be injured begin
When the last new magazines were released yesterday, it finally became literally impossible to open a magazine in Japan without seeing a picture of a female celebrity wearing a Japan football jersey, and I knew that the World Cup had come.
The only consolation is that there is an interesting way to say "world cup" in Japanese:
The interesting part is the W. Many English initialisms are used in Japan, like CM for "commercial [movie]", but W is a special letter: it can represent meaning all by itself. This is because it is generally pronounced "double" instead of "double-u", so it's handy for referring to things that are doubled. (Do we do this in the Speakingenglishosphere too? I'd never noticed, if so.)
For example: Wチーズバーガー (double cheeseburger): an English word borrowed into Japanese and now refused all contact with its native orthography except the idiosyncratic Japanese W. But W can also be applied to Japanese words, e.g.
"But wait! The W in
Joel:
Nice post. I've been wondering how to pronounce that combo that I read everywhere these days.
Any other similar uses of Y as in Yシャーツ? The potential for Yカラー has already been headed off at the pass, has it not, with ハイカラー.
How do you render X and Y chromosomes in Japanese?