One of the words that’s most firmly ensconced in my memory from my years in Japan is baka ‘idiot, fool’ — people yell it at each other all the time, and you hear it in Japanese movies as well. Leanne Ogasawara, at her Substack blog Dreaming in Japanese, posts about it in the context of a drama about Murasaki Shikibu:
Something that really caught my attention in the show was the origins of the surpring kanji used to write the Japanese word for “fool,” or “baka.” Written as horse deer, 馬鹿 baka, is one of the most famous Japanese words that even people with only a passing understanding of Japanese have probably heard. Since Japan does not have a lot of “bad words” baka is used a lot in Japan!
But why is fool written as horse deer???
After Murasaki’s father remarks that it’s too bad she wasn’t born a boy, he reads her a passage from the Chinese Records of the Grand Historian 史記 about the First Emperor Qin Shi Huang and infamous traitor, the Minister Zhao Gao (died 207 BCE). Wanting to wrest control of power and the mandate to rule, Zhao brings a deer to court and pointing to it, calls it a horse. The second emperor laughs and says, “Aren’t you mistaken? That looks like a horse to me,” to which Zhao asks everyone in the room: “is this a deer or is it a horse?”—Most present, however, wanting to ingratiate themselves with the minister, called the deer a horse. But […] those who remained silent, he later had killed.
This is where the Chinese idiom “point at a deer and say horse” 指鹿為馬 comes from and the Japanese 鹿を指して馬となす Shika o Sashite Uma to Nasu) meaning “deliberate misrepresentation for ulterior purposes.”
This is the first I’ve heard about the horse/deer origin story, which I presume is your basic just-so folk etymology; the Wiktionary entry I linked at the start of the post says:
Probably originally a transcription of Sanskrit मोह (moha, “folly”), used as a slang term among monks.
Alternatively, may have arisen from the same root as Old Japanese 痴 (woko, modern oko, “stupidity, ridiculousness”). However, this theory is problematic phonologically, as the /b/ ↔ /w/ shift is difficult to explain.
I’ll be interested to hear from anyone who knows more about all this. Thanks, Trevor!
This suggests (as I think you suspected) that the allusion to the learned Classical Chinese idiom is one of a number of competing etymological just-so stories, none of which is necessarily definitive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baka_(Japanese_word) I remember the “baka-yaro” compound as sort of the default standard form, at least among gaijin third-graders in 1973.
And of course, as everyone knows, a hippophagous Chinese emperor coined the term “Umami” after downing a particularly toothsome hoof.
I remember the “baka-yaro” compound as sort of the default standard form, at least among gaijin third-graders in 1973.
Yes, that’s very familiar to me from a decade earlier.
As a cogent example of a word that has followed the path of monkish slang from a Sanskrit abstract noun to a modern colloquial Japanese word for a person, there is 旦那 danna. The semantic development from Sanskrit dānam ‘gift; giving; the virtue of generosity’ to modern Japanese 旦那 danna ‘husband’ is outlined adequately in the Wiktionary entry here.
Very cool!
Carr’s article, Baka and Fool, is very worthwhile. It’s a rare example of semantic mapping of insult terms, which is very challenging, and which dictionaries avoid.
Thanks. Here’s an archived version of the article.
It begins:
There’s a nice bit at the bottom of p. 14 that includes this:
I clearly failed to pick up the macron-lengthened final vowel in “baka-yarō” on the ASIJ playground …
FWIW, Mami Suzuki posted a little article on “baka” etymology for Tofugu back in May 2015 in which she briefly reviewed five different theories.
Interesting stuff, thanks! It’s got not just etymologies but usage, e.g.:
For the curious, here is the poem 傷宅 Shāng zhái of Bai Juyi (in Japanese, usually known with his courtesy name as 白楽天 Haku Rakuten) that was referenced in the article (boldface added):
Translation by Xiaoshan Yang in ‘Having It Both Ways: Manors and Manners in Bai Juyi’s Poetry’, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 56 (1996):
Some of Xiaoshan Yang’s interesting discussion of this poem from his article:
re “point at a deer and say horse”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Père_David%27s_deer
My wife, who is as Edo as they come, explained “baka” simply as “It is absurd. It can’t exist. So it is stupid.”
Père David’s deer “is sometimes known by its informal name sibuxiang (Chinese: 四不像; pinyin: sì bú xiàng; Japanese: shifuzō), literally meaning “four not alike”, which could mean “the four unlikes” or “like none of the four”; it is variously said that the four are cow, deer, donkey, horse (or) camel, and that the expression means in detail:
“the hooves of a cow but not a cow, the neck of a camel but not a camel, antlers of a deer but not a deer, the tail of a donkey but not a donkey.”
“the nose of a cow but not a cow, the antlers of a deer but not a deer, the body of a donkey but not a donkey, tail of a horse but not a horse”
“the tail of a donkey, the head of a horse, the hoofs of a cow, the antlers of a deer”
“the neck of a camel, the hoofs of a cow, the tail of a donkey, the antlers of a deer”
“the antlers of a deer, the head of a horse and the body of a cow”[10]”
Shades of the nilgai, Boselaphus tragocamelus…
I first learned the word baka from John Hersey’s Hiroshima, where a priest is trying to comfort orphaned children in the days after the bomb, telling them riddles: “What is the cleverest animal in the world?” The answer is the hippopotamus, kaba カバ (河馬, ‘river horse’), the reverse of baka.
I prefer 阿呆 aho myself.
To amplify the preceding comment, aho (including do-aho “complete idiot”) is the preferred word in the Kansai region and is thus relatively mild due to its widespread and common use. Baka is only trotted out when you want to deliver a serious imprecation.
See Hat’s quote above: baka is “the go-to word when you really want to curse someone out in the Kansai region (Mie, Nara, Wakayama, Kyoto, Osaka, Hyogo, and Shiga)”.
Michael Carr’s article, which Hat refers to above, states that baka ni suru/sareru (馬鹿にする/される) means “make a fool of (someone)”. This is completely wrong. The meaning is not “make a fool of (someone) / be made a fool of” but “mock, ridicule (someone)” / “be mocked or ridiculed”.
If Carr gets this one so wrong in an article that is supposedly on “comparative semantics”, I’m wondering whether anything else the article says can be trusted.
The Mami Suzuki article, on the other hand, is full of good information, including the information on aho I mentioned above.
What is the difference between “make a fool of” and “mock, ridicule”?
I suppose you can make a fool out of someone by swindling them or telling them everyone will show up to the party undressed when this is not the plan. Mocking or ridiculing does not involve the target believing the mocking or ridiculing statements.
Thanks, Plastic Paddy, that is exactly the difference.
“Making a fool of someone” involves putting them in a situation where they look like a fool.
Cambridge Dictionary: “to trick someone or make someone appear stupid in some way”.
“Mocking or ridiculing someone” just means telling them they are stupid, etc.
Cambridge Dictionary: “mock someone” = “to laugh at someone, often by copying them in a funny but unkind way: They were mocking him because he kept falling off his bike. She made fun of him by mocking ”
Cambridge Dictionary: “ridicule someone” = “to laugh at someone in an unkind way : She rarely spoke her mind out of fear of being ridiculed.”
plus:
Cambridge Dictionary: “make fun of someone” = “to make a joke about someone or something in a way that is not kind”