Why do people keep writing about the imaginary compound Cr2Gr2Te6?

Re:Why do people keep writing about the imaginary compound C... by tkgally on Tuesday August 26, 2025 @09:34PM (#45034464)

More than twenty years ago, I had fun tracing a similar phenomenon: English “proverbs” that appeared in English dictionaries and textbooks published in Japan but that did not seem to have any actual currency in English. It became clear that they had been copied from dictionary to dictionary for decades before large-scale corpora and search engines made it possible to check actual usage.

“Every man has his humo(u)r.”

https://www.gally.net/leavings/00/0001.html

“Losers are always in the wrong.”

https://www.gally.net/leavings/00/0098.html

In their heyday, dozens of English-Japanese dictionaries were published in Japan:

https://www.gally.net/leavings/00/0005.html

Producing an original dictionary from scratch would have been expensive and time consuming, so most publishers borrowed liberally from each other.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Why do people keep writing about the imaginary compound C... by floren on Wednesday August 27, 2025 @12:57AM (#45035607)

If you haven't come across "English as She Is Spoke" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_as_She_Is_Spoke), your proverbs remind me of that.

Craunch the marmoset!

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Why do people keep writing about the imaginary compound C... by javawizard on Wednesday August 27, 2025 @01:04AM (#45035653)

I remember running across a shirt for sale in Japan that said:

  Free is free
  Shit is shit
  Damn

I don't know what it was about that particular sequence of words but man if it didn't get me something good.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Why do people keep writing about the imaginary compound C... by tkgally on Wednesday August 27, 2025 @01:54AM (#45035883)

That definitely deserves proverb status!

Around the same time I was collecting those ghost proverbs, I spent a pleasant afternoon in Shinjuku, Tokyo, taking pictures of T-shirts:

https://www.gally.net/tshirts/index.html

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Why do people keep writing about the imaginary compound C... by pavel_lishin on Wednesday August 27, 2025 @05:56PM (#45045825)

One of the things I'm looking forward to most is traveling to Japan, and maybe other parts of eastern Asia, and collecting a ridiculous amount of nonsensical t-shirts to ship back home.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Why do people keep writing about the imaginary compound C... by thrashwerk on Wednesday August 27, 2025 @06:50AM (#45037880)

“Losers are always in the wrong.” sounds like "History is written by the victors." just from a different PoV.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Why do people keep writing about the imaginary compound C... by Sprotch on Wednesday August 27, 2025 @07:16AM (#45038055)

Sounds a bit like the French "Les absents ont toujours tort", which means "those absent are always wrong".

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Why do people keep writing about the imaginary compound C... by sporkland on Wednesday August 27, 2025 @10:23AM (#45040145)

Thought the same, but it's much less insightful than the original.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Why do people keep writing about the imaginary compound C... by Izkata on Wednesday August 27, 2025 @10:35AM (#45040308)

> “Every man has his humo(u)r.”

I think this is the likely origin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Every_Man_in_His_Humour

But I think I've also heard the "has" phrasing as a pun on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humorism

[ Parent | on HN ]