As students of Japanese know, there are a lot of homophones floating around the language. If you add in the difficulty some students have working with the long and short vowels in Japanese (chizu= map and chiizu=cheese), the number increases.
Sometimes though, a creative mind can hear some of these words without having seen the kanji used and create little stories about the etymology of a given Japanese idiom.
I’ve done this myself and here are a few examples from when I was starting out on my Japanese language learning adventure.
One of the most prominent was my misunderstanding of the term
無視する
mushi suru
… which means to ignore.
I now know that the first character, m, is similar to “non”, “un”, or “anti” in English, and “shi” refers to regarding, recognizing, or seeing. Put them together and it comes to mean ignore.
Beginning students will know, however, that “mushi” can also be:
虫
which means insect…
When I first heard the term “mushi suru”, I just assumed that “to ignore someone” in Japanese meant to “make a bug of them” or “treat them like a bug”. You can imagine my surprise and disappointment at the blandness of the true kanji for the word.
I also went out of my way to create an entire mythology about the Chinese food known in Japan as “chawan mushi“. It’s a delicious custard with chunks of mushroom, boiled shrimp and other goodies in it.
“Chawan” refers to the small bowl in which it is prepared and served. “Mushi” is the verb stem of “musu” (meaning “to steam”) being used as a noun.
Keep in mind however that the first meaning of “mushi” that people tend to learn is insect.
The mythology I created then is of course that at some time in the past someone thought that shrimp (an important ingredient in chawan mushi) was an insect. Hence the term chawan mush, or insect bowl.
Yeah, I know it’s crazy, but there are stranger etymologies in the world and the old story about pilgrims in the New World mistaking lobsters for giant insects.
The funny thing about the misunderstandings above is that they never affected my usage of the language. It took learning kanji and actually seeing the written words for me to see the light. A part of me still kind of wishes I was right about chawan mushi though.