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November 24, 2001

The kanji for carburettor

"He doesn't suffer fools gladly...Well who does?" "Hello I'm a fool!" "Come in! Come in, you crazy fool!" "And this is my friend, he's got Jam for brains." "Whooo hooo? Ooo hoo hooo hoo oooo!" "Come in!" Ahem. Anyway, yes, actually I probably used to suffer fools rather more gladly than I do now.

People who send me requests for kanji ("Please send me the character for computer hacker - thanx") used to get polite rebuttals. I don't mind looking up and mailing people the kanji for individual Japanese words, as long as they tell me the Japanese word they want. It's all very well asking me for the kanji for "chaos", but do you mean konran or ranma? So I put a disclaimer on the site, asking people to research their own translations using other more suitable means... and still they come. "Please send me the kanji for 'The Four Musketeers'." "Please send me the kanji for illiterate so I can tattoo it onto my forehead." For christ's sake - read the disclaimer.

So now I have a standard polite rebuttal e-mail which I ping back to the ones who fail to RTFM - until I got one the other day which read simply, "monk". Three deep breaths, resist the urge to scream at the keyboard... at least he got instant attention, as opposed to having to wait a couple of weeks while I got around to him. My instant reply?

"ey"

I think I may be about to lose it. Bigtime.

Posted by chris at November 24, 2001 11:32 AM | Permalink

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