How many times have you been caught, tongue-tied and groping blindly in the darkest corners of your vocabulary for exactly the right word, only to have it scuttle away out of reach, leaving you with only the vaguest sense of its outline and the lingering shame of having failed?
We here at the ol’ raincoaster blog feel your pain. As a public service, from time to time we provide a roundup of obscure-yet-universally-applicable terms for our readers to file in their heads, ready to flash dazzlingly on just the right occasion.
This should be handy for those of you whose friends have recently given birth. Lord knows, they don’t talk about anything else. As the Inuit are said to have fifty words for snow, so the Japanese have coined a surprisingly robust number of terms for what we would simply call “poop”. #2. Doo-doo. Crap. Shit. Turds. Shizzola.
Here, from Japanprobe, is an in-depth dictionary of dung.
- unpi 「うんぴ」 : Diarrheal stool. Could be connected to overeating, having a cold, or stress. It is usually a yellowish-color and it has a very strong smell.
- unnyo 「うんにょ」 : Soft and tender poop, but not diarrehea. It comes out when you are feel some indigestion. Yellow-ish or light brown in color.
- unchi 「うんち」 : Nice poop. It comes out when you’ve been eating healthy balanced meals. It has a clean brown color and doesn’t smell very much.
- ungo 「うんご」 : Comes out when you’ve not been eating enough vegetables, and you’re probably constipated when you squeeze out an ungo. Ungo is dark black and really stinky.
So the next time your new-parent friends are yammering on about how your creamed corn looks adorably like Junior‘s last bowel movement, you can bring that conversation to a screeching, juddering halt while simultaneously flashing a glimpse of your own, more cosmopolitan worldview: Just leap to your feet and yell UNKO!
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Wow–and I thought the Inuit were all impressive-like, with 200 words for snow.
Did you read that post? And no, they do not have 200.
I will never understand the Japanese, and thank God for that.
Amen. Now that LSD is out, we have only them to supply hallucinogenic strangeness.
…oh, and one of the friends to whom I had sent a link to this post retaliated with this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bristol_Stool_Scale
Oh. Gee. Thanks. All the joy has gone out of my Turtles now.
Wow, that’ll teach me to post at … 3:25 PM? I was almost sober too. Gotta watch that.
I’ve waited two days now . . . is it up to me to make some sort of shiitake reference?
I knew we could count on you. In related news, the new Reece’s peanut butter cup crunch bar looks exactly like the end result of eating too much corn on the cob. But I managed to choke it down anyway.
[...] Filed under: Uncategorized — Frontier Former Editor @ 11:27 pm After Rain’s wonderful monograph on Japanese linguistics and feces, here’s a little treat from Wikipedia (courtesy of [...]
At least there won’t be any change from entry to exit . . . .
Right. That’s why smoothies are so popular with bulimics. Looks the same going in both directions.
Good Lord … the poop on bowel movements – *rotflmao*
This post is just gushing with natural goodness
And you want me to “eat your feed” …
If it was good enough for Chuck Berry, it’s good enough for you!