this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2025
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macron trump-enlightened

Me seeing this graphic in a Youtube video

"Buddha-type valve???" monke-beepboop

(These are the three types of valves you find on bicycle tires: Presta, Dunlop and Schrader, often also called French, English and American valves, respectively)

I somehow didn't know this before and I find it really funny

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[–] AernaLingus@hexbear.net 12 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

If anyone's wondering why, it's called ateji: writing foreign loanwords with kanji that have similar sounds but not necessarily much correspondence in meaning. Nowadays people just write things using katakana (a phonetic script where each character represents a single syllable), but ateji used to be the standard. That said, it's still very common to see single-character abbreviations for countries which use the first character of their ateji names (e.g. 独 for Germany, 豪 for Australia, and the aforementioned 仏 for France) in headlines as well as compounds like {日豪|にちごう}{関係|かんけい} (Japan-Australian relations) or, apparently, {仏式|ふつしき}バルブ.