Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Just Two Lines from Page Six


1: ……やめよう。
……Yame yō。
......Let's stop this.

2: こんな・カッコ・で・バカ・みたい・だ。
Konna kakko de baka mitai da。

I guess カッコ (kakko) would make immediate sense to someone who grew up speaking Japanese, but it's a real puzzler to me. Both Babelfish and Google translation guess it is the same as 括弧 which can mean parentheses or brackets. Neither of those seems to make much sense here, do they? Jim Breen's online Japanese dictionary comes up with quite a few more words that can be pronounce kakko. The first, 格好 or 恰好, can mean "appearance" and is probably the right meaning here, which Google renders as "I was dressed like an idiot." which can easily mean "We are dressed/look like idiots." The tense implies a completed action, so by extension I will render this way:

We're already dressed like idiots.

Perhaps Daichi is implying that they should not add icing to the cake by behaving like idiots, especially in public.

No comments: