I love a good aside, a footnote, an afterthought. A scrawled comment written in the margins. Something too good to be left out, slipped between two commas (or crammed into parentheses when commas can’t contain them). This is my favorite way to learn too: randomly.

I learned a word from a Jdrama a few weeks ago (yes. There are legal places to watch Jdramas now). It stuck out because the scene was so funny. A grade student asked a high schooler to help him with his kanji homework. He asked her how to read this:

兎に角

The high schooler’s (internal) reaction was, “they teach kanji of this level to middle schoolers?” which was funny enough all by itself. Out loud she said “It’s read うさぎ に つの (rabbit (to) horn).” What followed was a beautiful, if shockingly rude, put down where the kid told her how it was really read (tonikaku→　とにかく) and then went and used it in his very next sentence. You know, as if she might not even know what it means.

Since I saw this episode I’ve been noticing this phrase everywhere. It’s very common, since takes the place of “anyway, in other words, generally speaking . . . ” and a handful of other vague, but  apparently polite enough, transitionals. I finally got around to looking up the kanji today, and sure enough, they mean rabbit and horn respectively, even though their reading is different (for the phrase they use their Japanese readings). I was delighted, and then delighted again when I saw how many variations there were on the phrase. Take out the にand you have 兎角, “various things”. Or it can can mean rabbit horns, which is exactly like hens’ teeth, and comes from a Buddhist proverb: 兎角亀毛, horns on a rabbit and fur on a turtle.

Knowing this we come back to 兎に角with a different perspective. It’s not some grammatical problem we have to memorize, its plain idiom (which, yes, we still have to memorize).{{1}} [[1]] It’s neither here nor there, but there is nothing funnier than wathcing other nations use their own idioms. Imagine the tense faces of serious men saying “the beans have been spilled sir, Agent X let the cat out of the bag.”  [[1]] Horns to a Rabbit. “Forgetting what was just said as irrelevant to what I’m about to say . . . . 兎に角終わりましょう.”

Strange

and

Beautiful.