Wordcatcher Tales: Baggywrinkle, 歃=Slurp

Baggywrinkle – The Mexican Navy's training vessel ARM Cuauhtémoc visited Honolulu recently. It is a beautiful ship, a three-masted barque manufactured in Bilbao, Spain, in 1982, with steel hull, cables, and belaying pins, but teak deck and fine wooden railings and housings. The ship arrived and departed with most of the crew aloft, standing in the yards and shrouds, singing lively songs that carried far across the water as they set out to sea, bound for California. I was lucky enough to go aboard during its stay, to watch its theatrical departure, and to learn a new piece of nautical vocabulary from the encounter. Many of the thinner steel cables (stays) before the masts were covered with yellow baggywrinkle to prevent the sails from chafing against the metal. (Perhaps the baggywrinkle also helped ensure that no sailors would be sliced through if they fell from the rigging above—if they somehow slipped their harnesses and safety lines.)

歃 susuru 'slurp' — One of my retirement hobbies is ramen research. This week I tried a new lunchtime ramen "pop-up" called Slurp on the premises of Vino wine bar at Restaurant Row (a.k.a. Waterfront Plaza) in downtown Honolulu. Their mazemen ('mix noodles' [not soupy]) was excellent, with Okinawan-style thick soba noodles, char siu, 5-minute egg, smoked bacon, ikura (salmon roe), katsuobushi (dried bonito flakes), and Tokyo negi (chopped leek).

But their logo set me off on another episode of a lifelong hobby: kanji research. It's a cleverly employed but relatively obscure (hyougai 'unlisted') kanji that I had to clip from the Unicode Unihan database, where its codepoint is U+6B43. The more common kanji for susuru 'slurp' in Japanese is 啜, as in 啜り上げる susuri-ageru 'suck up' or 啜り泣く susuri-naku 'sob, sniffle'. (But when I first checked 'slurp' in Google Translate on my smartphone, all I got was 吸い込む sui-komu 'suck in' in Japanese and 思乐普 si-le-pu in Chinese, just a hanzi rendering of the sounds of the English word.) The regular kanji 啜 for susuru 'slurp' has the 'mouth' (口 kuchi) radical on its left and 4 little grasping hands (又) on the right. The restaurant Slurp has instead chosen to stylize the more obscure kanji for its logo. The kanji 歃 susuru 'slurp' has the 'yawning' (欠 akubi) radical on its right. It looks a bit like a person with shoulders and one arm hanging down, beneath which the logo has added a small bowl of steaming ramen. The left side of the kanji looks as if the top of a tongue (舌) is protruding from an open-mouthed mortar (臼) with jaws and teeth.