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10/8/14

Engrish With Ultraman Ace (part two)

The Malaysian subtitlers continue to beguile us with entertaining structure, daringly-misused tenses, and vocabulary lessons:
Some context: a mother has grown extremely weary of her son raising pigeons. (Reminds me of the old Tom Lehrer joke, "he practiced animal husbandry...until they caught him at it one day...")
The alien is taunting Ace and the team, telling them their efforts are futile.  This is either a proverb or just bizarre translating.
It's not what? Once again, I had to consult the dictionary.  This French word is a noun meaning:
"(in the French Revolutionary calendar) the fifth month of the year, extending from January 20 to February 18,"
so my guess is that Hokuto is telling his teammates that their current discussion has nothing to do with the weather in Revolutionary France, when people had messed-up calendars. 
This was a bit more confusing to figure out, but the word means "the object, itself
inaccessible to experience, to which a phenomenon is referred for the basis or cause of its sense content."  I think the point here is that the alien is projecting an image of itself, but the alien is, in reality, somewhere else. (They could have just said that.)
I don't know if I explained this last time, but in ACE, a "choju" is a special kind of kaiju.  Also they are filled with delicious meat, apparently.
Once again, the Malaysians have taught me a word that at first glance looked like it simply couldn't be real.  The word "oppugn" (pronounced like the word "impugn") means "to assail by criticism, argument, or action; to call in question; dispute," and comes from the same Latin root as the word "pugnacious."  You can even be an "oppugner."


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