躾

situke
manners, bearing, posture, breeding

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I had never seen the character for a word I had often heard and used before. and when I saw it, I nearly laughed at loud at how much sense it made...

the left-hand radical is the character for 'body', as in one's physical body:身
the right-hand radical, 'beautiful':美

what a great combination!

another cool aspect of this character is that it only exists in Japanese. it is not kanzi, but rather kokuzi, one of the characters that the Japanese invented for concepts that do not exist in Chinese. imagine not finding a concept among the more than 40,000 ideographs that exist in Chinese...

誤植

gosyoku

misprint, typographical error

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what I found fascinating about this word was that I originally thought it had to be a mistake itself. the second character is specific to botanical planting. you find it in words like 'bush' or 'transplant' or 'colony'. I wasn't expecting it to be used in a printing or text sense.

改竄

kaizan
falsification, alteration, spoofing

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I love the second character. at top, the radical refers to 'hole', 'cave', 'den'... and then below that, 'rat'. that character itself means 'to flee'. the image is of a rat scurrying away into its hidey-hole. which is reinforced by this four-character Chinese aphorism:
抱頭鼠竄
(there's no immediate equivalent in Japanese, but the meaning is)
covering your head and running away like a rat.

what a wonderful image, in just four characters!

見計らう

mihakarau
to choose at one's own discretion

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first off, I chose to restart this blog in response to an assignment in a class I am now taking, called Ideation. one of the key aspects of the assignment was to make this project something that I could easily incorporate into my everyday schedule, and since I am translating everyday, and encounter new or interesting Japanese words everyday, I thought this might be a good place to start.
it's interesting, because I originally thought of doing a continuation of my floriography project as the assignment, but, in truth, I don't review my photographs everyday, nor can I see myself setting aside time to layout and typeset the associated text for each photo, even though I would want to eventually.
regardless, I chose today's word for a few reasons.

first off, the definition didn't seem to match what I originally thought the word might mean.

見 refers to vision, seeing, looking, and 計 to measuring, gauging.

in retrospect, the definition makes sense, but I thought it might mean something like, measure by eye...

another reason the word stood out was I thought it was neat that Japanese had a compact term for something we need to express in several words. I always love it when a language has a simple way of saying something.

名前空間

namae kuukan

namespace

a literal translation. very weird. normally, Japanese would import a technology term like this into katakana, as ne-mu supe-su, but for some reason this was kanji-fied...

一意

iti'i

unique

didn't think this compound would mean this...

感嘆符

wakkanhu

exclamation point!