You want me to eat WHAT?!
“Kuso” (くそ, 屎) means “shit” in Japanese.
Shit pizza.
This unfortunately isn’t the first time I’ve seen this word in Xiamen. I was going to blog about it last year, but didn’t find the time. But I still have the picture:
This was the entrance to the basement of a shopping center just across from the main gate of Xiamen University. The faux stone is gone and the name has been changed, but my kids and I still refer to it as “The S Market”.
I notice that the Chinese in both pictures has 创意 (chuàngyì, creative/creativity), and one has 艾迪尔 (āidí’ěr), which is a non-erhua hanzification of “idea”.
While it’s a terrible idea to have a name like “kuso” in a cosmopolitan city like Xiamen, where there are many Japanese students and businessmen, this idea must have come from somewhere. Perhaps a reader will be able to comment on the possibility of “kuso” being a romanization of 创意 in another Chinese language like Minnan or Hakka. (I’m somewhat embarrassed to say that though I’ve been living in Xiamen for a year now, I still haven’t learned any Minnan. I need to get more language materials for it.)
Oh my god….
How’s the taste?
The first thing that comes to mind is the equivalence between KUSO and 惡搞 (“恶搞”) in Taiwan mandarin. I can see how one could get from 恶搞 to creativity — spoof videos, etc, are original creative works.
Isn’t that an erhua hanzification? Or is it non-erhua cuz you’re in the south? Confused…
I mean that the 艾迪尔 is pronounced with a non-erhua accent, producing something that sounds like “idea” (otherwise it would be /ai.di.ɚ/. Maybe I should have said “derhoticized”.
@TAK: I didn’t stick around to taste it….
As Kaiwen suggested I think it is probably from the Taiwanese Mandarin meaning of 惡搞.
As for Minnan language tools I recommend the Taiwanese MOE Dictionary (http://twblg.dict.edu.tw/holodict_new/index.html). Despite the slight difference in dialects with Xiamen, the examples and recordings will still prove useful.
How about Japanese 空想, ‘imagination, fantasy’? Better romanised as kūsō, but some people don’t have time for macrons. Just a stab in the dark.
Someone has already written about this. See:
ifun10kuso.blogspot.com/2009/10/pizza.html
It’s a blog so I can’t open it, but the Google search snippet says: くそ:[kuso] (ad.v)出自日本語； 原意是「可惡、糞、X的」等罵人的話， 現又用來形容一些令人”會心一笑”的事物~ 也有惡搞~搞笑之意~，所有資料皆來自….