Kawaii Puft

Finally! A Ghostbusters shirt!

I’m interested! What does it say on it though?

Just in case… Someone asked.

What in the world is zenia ai?

As a kid, I’ve always wanted but never had that Ghostbuster trap to complete my Proton pack.

So what color is it? Black or dark blue?
Thanks!

I was considering getting this shirt, cause it’s cute and funny. Then I read the lines, “The marshmallow was brought to the Mediterranean in the 14th century and killed over 100 million people” and “A marshmallow is created whenever a child stops believing in Santa Claus.” I immediately clicked the big yellow “Buy Now” button.

If you could be so kind, lovely woot staff, find the person who wrote the product description, and tell them they made a sale on the shirt because of their excellent description.

<3

It looks like it says:
“Zeniaai”

Which is written in kattakana, so it’s meant to be an English word…

Maybe they were going for: “ジュウウル”? Which would be “Zuul”

I dunno…

Yeah I googled it, but nothing came up. I thought I just read it wrong, but I guess not.

Peppy. And I feel the urge to wield graham crackers like twin swords in self defense.

I took 5 years of Japanese… looks like gibberish to me. Ze Ni A A I. If it were a true borrowed work, it would be Zenia-i. I’ve never seen vowels repeated in katakana like that. Someone probably just looked at a syllabary chart and wrote down the ones that looked cool.

Done. That’s by the wonderful Sam who also does ‘That’s So Teddy’.

Excellent. Thank you for passing that on, and thank you for the information!

Maybe they were going for “mallow” which is ゼニアオイ

Google Translate

engrish is always funny/cool, but it doesn’t work the other way around, so… pass :\

Aww, the artist managed to make something kowaii (scary) into something kawaii!

And I agree with others that the katakana on the shirt is probably gibberish, unless it’s meant to be a sound effect?

Well, looking at it closely for the last five minutes looks like “pufft” in Japanese letters.

If that we’re true, I dunno if my Asian friends will frown at me for it.

Or the designer deliberately misspelled the letters to avoid getting sued. Since everybody be suing each other for little things nowadays.

I was just about to say that. It looks like a failed attempt to translate marshmallow to Japanese. Also that word refers to a plant, not the food.

-sigh- Another woot shirt that I ~kind of~ like but Anvil is pushing me away on. I’d like to let you guys know you’ve lost 4 shirt sales from me in the last 2 weeks because of anvil. After recent bad experiences with anvil It’s going to take a design that really wows me before I make another shirt.woot purchase.

I’m just going to have to cross my fingers for this to show up in future randoms I suppose.

This a great shirt to confuse Japanese people and anyone else who happens to know katakana.

Katakana means foreign word, not necessarily English. But in this case it’s a Japanese word, think of the Katakana as writing in italics.

My dictionary says it means "a mallow; Malva sylvestris var. mauritiana.