2007-08-13

Non-WTF weddings

Wedding magazine Zexy's cover story this week month:

ゲストに「喜ばれること」「失礼になること」

The intended meaning is clearly an isomer of "things that delight guests and things that disgruntle guests", but notice that the particle ni is used to mark two things:

  1. The agent in a passive construction: gesuto ni yorokobareru, "(be) rejoiced over by guests"
  2. The experiencer (?) in an active construction: gesuto ni shitsurei ni naru, "(be) impolite to guests"

Trying to think of a parallel construction in English, the best I could come up with was something like "Most popular songs describes women who either stand or are dumped by their man."

That said, though, I don't think this is particularly WTFic in Japanese, and two native informants agree. The fact that it's a headline rather than a sentence probably helps, but the real lesson is this: Zexy weighs a goddamn ton.

Popularity factor: 3

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amida:

"yorokobarareru"
Except they went ra-less. (喜ばれること)

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Adamu:

Agreed on that last point -- that's why any self-respecting person uses the online version.

And yes once you "get used" to Japanese massive use of passive tense is only natural. Sad and needlessly vague, but natural. I need to get around to inventing a style guide that's a reverse version of Newspeak for Japanese

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Matt:

Amida: God, that's embarrassing. "yorokobarareru" isn't even a word. And I was specifically concentrating when I wrote that out in romaji! Maybe that was the problem.

Adamu: True about the naturalness. (And the online verson.) The issue I was trying to raise isn't the use of passive as such, though, so much as the overloading of "ni".

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