12/14/2009

Japanese coworker: “Do you have Hotchkiss?”
Me: “Huh?”

For some damn reason the 3Yen has been slammed with a several hundred of people searching the site for the words “sex with staplers” for the past 24 hours.
What does stapler sex have to do with the the 3Yen’s coverage of Japanese news, arts, and culture?

Nothin’.

However, I don’t want to disappoint all these new visitors so let me tell you all about the odd Japanese term for stapler, hochikisu .

Hochikisu is the mangled Japanese pronunciation of the name Hotchkiss from the E. H. Hotchkiss Company of Connecticut, U.S.A who first sold staplers in Japan in early 1900s. In Japanese, the word hochikisu became the generic name for a stapler. That’s the reason I have Japanese coworkers asking me questions like, “Do you have Hotchkiss?”

Now I hear you asking, “What the hell do machine guns have to do with staplers?”

Hotchkiss stapler (top) vs Hotchkiss gun (bottom)

Click to enlarge to the full-size, 1220 X 839.

One of the funnier Japanese-English dictionary mistakes* is that the Benjamin Berkeley Hotchkiss (died 1885) invented one of the first machine guns. And Japanese dictionaries confuse that Hotchkiss gun with totally different George Hotchkiss who 10 years after the death the Hotchkiss gun inventor founded an office supply company who marketed the first stapler in Japan. Read a full explanation of Hotchkiss lexicographic mixup in Japanese dictionaries here.

So, the next time you pick up a “hochikisu,” think of stapler sex and machine guns since they’re so easy to confuse.

*Almost every page of
Japanese-English dictionaries have
errors (mostly errors of omission and nuisance).

UPDATE: We have been tangentially Slashdotted. According 3Yen reader “Andy F,” “sex with staplers” was a comment made in a Slashdot discussion about Privacy and Google. Oddly, Bing.com does not register the 3Yen’s sexwithstaplers but Yahoo.com lists it first.