Dotted Is and red E

用意周到
you.i.shuu.tou

Literally: use – mind – circumference – arrive

Alternately: Thorough preparations, without any oversights. Being incredibly careful; doing everything possible to get ready for something. A good way to be, if you can manage.

Notes: This is a compound of compounds. 用意 refers to “preparation” (and often given as a command before “start” for various sporting competitions), while 周到 refers to “meticulosity,” which, yes, is a real word.

Replacing 到 with homophone 倒, “fall down,” is an error, of course.

This strikes me as just about the most useless possible version of cargo pants you could make.

An actual ad for hip-support cargo pants that puns on ¾ of the characters. The you here is “hips/waist.”

About Confanity

I love the written word more than anything else I've had the chance to work with. I'm back in the States from Japan for grad school, but still studying Japanese with the hope of becoming a translator -- or writer, or even teacher -- as long as it's something language-related.
This entry was posted in Japanese, Yojijukugo and tagged , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s