• AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    I never tattooed it on myself, or anyone else, but I used to work at a local greasy spoon, and knew a Professor of English that came in regularly, who was originally from China. I asked him for the name specific characters that phonetically made up the syllables of my and my girlfriend’s names, he went to wait for his food, and came back with the characters he thought would work best. I used those to burn the characters into the weed stash box that she and I had made.

    We told everyone that asked that we had no clue what it actually meant, it just sounded like our names.

      • Sweetpeaches69@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        English names tend do just get characters that sound phonetically like their English pronunciation. As such, a lot of names, especially longer ones, don’t mean anything. If you directly translated them, a lot of the time you’d get like “cabbage the horse wheel” or something.

        • Whats_your_reasoning@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          If you directly translated them, a lot of the time you’d get like “cabbage the horse wheel” or something.

          That reminds me of the “Password Strength” comic by xkcd. All right, it’s settled. Next time I need new password, I’m feeding random names into a phonetic name translator.

      • AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        The Chinese English professor told me that my name meant something like “strong ox” and hers meant “beautiful lotus,” but I have no way to verify that, as I no longer have the box. She does.

        • savx@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          i would guess your name is John? “strong ox” seems 犟 to me(upper part is strong, bottom ox), beautiful lotus i got no idea.