Kiwis rip their heads in half and dance for your enjoyment
September 22nd, 2009 by James
A mildly disturbing Japanese commercial for Zespri kiwifruit:
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Kiwifruit please, not kiwis. Kiwis are either endangered birds or people from that country, neither one of which should have their heads ripped off (well, the former especially). Kiwis are no more kiwifruit than grapes are grapefruit–even less,in fact.
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and
Where I’m from we use “kiwi” when referring to the fruit, so I wrote it that way in the headline. (with the hope of also getting search engine traffic from people who want to see videos of New Zealanders and birds ripping their heads in half)
“The *American* Heritage Dictionary”
Precisely.
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Our English is different.
It might also offend you to hear that American English teachers in Japan tell school children to pronounce the letter Z as zee.
It’s not a matter of offence (or offense) but of calling a product or thing from a country by the name given to it by that country.
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I’m British, and always call them Kiwi Fruit or Chinese Gooseberries.
My daughter attends an international school in Tokyo. While it’s an American foundation, they allow parents to choose if their children are to be taught American or British spellings and so on.
That’s a good way of accommodating the international variations in accent and spelling patterns.
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I’ll keep using my crude American English. If I give in on kiwifruit, there will be no end to the revisions.
I suggest you join the “Its kiwifruit not kiwi” facebook group and mobilize them in a grand effort to force American dictionaries to remove their fruity definitions of “kiwi.”
Anyway, those kiwifruits on the video are singing as: We are the “kiwi”, Zespri “kiwi”. Dietary fibre, kalium, vitamin C, E!
The Japanese are also calling them in various way like Q-we, kee-uh-E, and such. Our Engrish is different. The Japanese has much serious problem on calling kiwifruit properly.
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“If I give in on kiwifruit, there will be no end to the revisions.”
Just to be clear, this isn’t about US-vs-non-US English but about correct names. So I am not sure how many revisions there really would be.
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What’s a kiwifruit?
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I figured it was, since you took issue with my citing an *American* English dictionary.
New Zealanders may have coined the term “kiwifruit,” but in my experience growing up on the east coast of the United States, the fruit was almost always called “kiwi.” You might not regard it as correct, but it has found its way into American English dictionaries as an acceptable term for kiwifruit.
But the bigger question here to which I am referring is whether the name given a thing by its originators should be honoured. In a similar vein, should we all write “Pearl Harbor” the American way, since it is an American placename, or is the “Harbor” part assumed to be more descriptive, and thus it is acceptable to change the spelling to the local variant?
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Of course it is. Unless Nihon, Turkiye, or Deutschland have suddenly become the norm.
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Is it too late to call dictionary fight? I think it is.
That is interesting. The commercial seems to indicate that the Japanese adapted the 外来語 of the name of the fruit from American English and not British English, though I think that would be due mainly for historical/shortness (in katakana) reasons.
(Edit: My electric dictionary for clarification! It lists the terms for kiwi in Japanese first for the birds found in New Zealand and then as the bottom entry, clarifying the “kiwi = ~fruit”. As in most conversational languages, dictionaries are not always followed.)
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Huh, I never even thought about this before. I’d always assumed it was just “kiwi”, with the bird and fruit sharing the same name.
But then again I guess it does matter to people who know/care about the difference. It reminds me of the time when my American friends went around calling miso soup as just “miso”…
“You drink that stuff!?”
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word brother, was just about to make the same point… passionfruit etc…
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i dont care about your Englishes but if japanese call it “Kiwi” then it is “Kiwi” for them. no matter what kind of English you do blabering.
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To counter your eloquent and erudite argument:
http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/キウイフルーツ
Plus just about every supermarket selling them “does blaber” the name as “kiwifruit.”
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in German, Danish, Russian, Polish, Dutch and French its “kiwi”. so japanese are right!
POINT!!
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No, complete miss of my point.
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In fact it’s a point.
In Spanish, it’s Kiwi, too. The same for the animal and the fruit, no need to fool-proof specification.
And if the dictionary says it’s so, that’s a point enough.
By the way, it’s the most stupid argue I have read in this blog XD.
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lol. what a debate on this small subject
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It’s a slow news day….
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When I was younger. I was told Kiwi were really hairy donkey balls!
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Clearly they are barbarian classed.
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Totally thought this was going to be a video about suicidal New Zealanders and was going to forward it to my Aussie friend who dislikes kiwis. But, alas, I got suicidal dancing fruit and a dictionary battle instead. … Okay, so maybe that’s not so bad either.
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i half expected to see kiwis aka newzealanders rip their head off o.O
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