I for one would like to take a moment to express my gratitude for the decades of selfles service that SapoMom gave to our country as a member of the Navy’s Waves.
It’s been against uniform regulations for a while to get tattoos while active. Recent changes require all existing tattoos to be small enough to be covered with an open hand OR to not be visible in normal uniforms OR to be waivered. Then there’s all the usual stuff about tattoo content. If you’re discovered with an undocumented tattoo, you can be made to have it removed (at your expense).
Marking the body isn’t kosher, even if the ink is.
Wow, this is just fucking lame. Do you claim to never use a dictionary to look up a word in the English language, Rubystreak? :dubious:
I actually SPEAK and READ English, so if I was going to get English words tattooed on my body, I don’t think I’d need a dictionary to get them right. :rolleyes: Also, if you tried to create a sentence or phrase in English without knowing the language just by using the dictionary, I doubt it would make a ton of sense or be grammatically correct. Ditto picking kanji out of the dictionary and stringing it together to attempt to create a meaningful phrase. Language is more nuanced and complex than that. Unless you really don’t CARE what it says and just like the pretty pictures. People never say that, though. They always tell you it means “strength” or “honor” or whatever, whether it really says that or not.
ETA: aruqvan, I’m not talking about you here. I’m talking about people who have no idea what their kanji might actually mean. There are plenty of them out there.
That’s exactly right…if someone really just picked a character at random because they think it looked cool, that would be one thing. But of course, they don’t…they always think it means something or want it to mean something. This is how it is different from appreciating an Impressionist painting. You can like a painting just because it is beautiful, and not have any specific meaning attached to it. Or, it can be symbolic of something to you as well…but those two things can be completely separated, which they can’t with language. You could get any word tattooed on yourself, and aesthetically, it would be the same. So why not just pick a character at random? I doubt most people would do that…because they know it’s not just art…it’s language that has a specific translation.
That conflicts with your arguement:
and the post you were responding to:
No shit. People often use a dictionary because they care. When I’m writing, I frequently use an English dictionary and thesaurus. I do so even more often when I’m writing in another tongue. The use of a dictionary does not preclude being well versed in a language, despite your lame-ass pronouncement to the contrary.
So is wearing jeans a trend? Earrings? T-shirts with your favorite band name?
Why?
Yes…all of those are trends. All a trend really is is a tendency for something to become more and more commonly done. Currently, jeans wearing is ubiquitous, but 50 years ago, it was much less common, and 50 years from now, it may be uncommon again.
See my most recent post before this one…I’ve tried to explain it a little better.
What “argument?” “Tattoos are lame,” isn’t an argument, it’s an opinion. And calling you out for acting like a prick isn’t an ad hominem. An ad hominem is an insult used in place of an argument. If I’d just posted, “Well, you’re an idiot, so I don’t have to listen to you,” that would be an ad hominem. If I call you an idiot in the process of engaging you in the ideas you have presented, I am not commiting an ad hominem, I’m just insulting you while I demolish your position. But, again, that’s not actually relevent to this thread, as all you’ve done is state your personal aesthetic preference, and then mock people who disagree with it. That makes you a prick. And doing so after you’ve specifically said you don’t do that makes you a hypocrite, to boot.
On the topic of wether or not you have a right to express your opinion: Of course you do. One poster said that you (or rather, Operation Ripper) did not. You’ve spent the rest of this thread milking that comment, even when talking to people who have never endorsed that particular statement, such as myself. I would never dream to say what you can or cannot say here. Without the ability for everyone to clearly state their opinions, we can never learn what sort of people we’re dealing with. And I have to say, I’ve learned a lot about what sort of person you are thanks to this thread. It’s been a real eye-opener, let me tell you.
Thanks, I was fearing the joke would be lost. This is one of my favourite jokes of all time and it is just too impolite to use anymore. 
ETA: just this weekend, on the beach, we saw this girl with tattoos over 40% of her body. Some of them really nice, most faded into purple nastiness. At any rate, our boy (age 3) had never seen such a thing. He got really excited about “the painted lady” and couldn’t get his eyes off her. When he asked “why is she painted”, I responded “to look pretty”. It took him a couple seconds to ask again “is she not pretty when she is not painted?”. “Yes, she is, she does it to look prettiER, it is decorative”. He spent the next five minutes repeating the word “decorative”.
Who fucking cares? Who fucking cares? To be perfectly honest, I don’t see why I should go to all the effort of learning a foreign script and language, so that I can read people’s tattoos to see if they actually mean anything, then trying to divine their intent when they had the tattoo made, just so that I can work out whether to be outraged or not. Who fucking cares?
Miller: If you somehow decided that I’m a terrible person based on this thread, I guess I can’t give much of a shit about what you think of me. You’ve called me a hypocrite yet failed to demonstrate any hypocrisy. I have said that I don’t like tattoos in general and kanji in particular. I have given reasons beyond just “it’s my aesthetic sense” WRT the topic of this thread. I never claimed that I didn’t make judgments about people, only that I was polite to them IRL and didn’t offer unsoliticited opinions. In the Pit, the rules of behavior are different. If that makes me a prick to you, well, I’ve been called worse by better. Hope you have some compressed oxygen so that you can breathe all the way up there on your high horse.
I don’t see the contradiction. I wouldn’t need a dictionary to get a phrase correct in English if I were so attached to that phrase that I wanted it tattooed on my body. I think that’s a pretty safe assumption. You can’t just string words together from the dictionary without knowing the language at all and hope it makes grammatical sense in that language. Please show the contradiction.
Would you need one to write out your tattoo? Because there’s a big difference between using a dictionary and thesaurus to write an essay using complex and unfamilar words, and using one to formulate a tattoo in another language with which you are wholly unfamiliar. I really don’t see the correlation. I’ve also already said that aruqvan is NOT the target of my argument in this case.
Wow, what the hell are you talking about? We’re discussing at cross purposes here. Person who doesn’t know language picking characters out of a dictionary and stringing them together=/= person fluent in language using dictionary for edification.
I actually really DON’T care. I’m not outraged. It doesn’t take a lot of divination to figure out why people got their tattoos because either you can’t see them and don’t know they have them, or they show you and tell you the story. At that point, one forms an opinion. It’s as natural as rain. A polite person keeps that opinion to herself, generally, but not so in the Pit. This is the place for it, I thought.
The people who are outraged in this thread are those that are so offended that someone might have an opinion about a topic that’s “none of your business,” and might express derision, in a Pit thread, towards that topic. It’s the pro-tattoo people who are, at this stage of the thread, frothing at the mouth, calling names, and making pronouncements about others’ character. Yet I’m the hypocrite. Please.
In honour of this thread, and the Pit in general, I’m gonna get a tattoo of a baby in a stroller gleefully pulling books of the shelves in a bookstore while horrified adults in the background give him the hairy eyeball.
He’ll have a talk balloon saying cuss-words in Japanese. 
Well, I was specifically thinking of when you said this:
…on page one, and then said this:
…on page three. Although, in fairness, “hypocrisy” isn’t quite the right word. “Liar” strikes me as being more accurate.
Oh, wait, I forgot. This is the Pit, so that makes everything “different.” See, the thing is, just because you’re allowed to be a dick in the pit, doesn’t actually free you from the (non-moderator induced) consequences of being a dick. You don’t like tattoos. That’s fine. Don’t get any. You don’t think they look good on other people. That’s also fine. But when you start attacking other people, simply because they have a different aesthetic taste than you do, well, that crosses a line. That’s when you’re actively being a jerk (in the non-bannable sense), so don’t act so surprised when people start treating you like you’re a jerk.
She says on her fourth page of the debate. Right. Pull the other one. It’s got tattoos of bells on it.
You’re really worked up about this, Miller. I thought a tattoo in Klingon was funny, even as the guy admitted it wasn’t “real” Klingon. I said so. That makes me a prick, a liar, and a jerk, huh? You really need to read the Pit more to gain some perspective if you think my behavior in this thread is so horrendous that it warrants this level of condescending censure and name-calling from you. Frankly, I used to think you were a cool guy, but now I think you’re a hard-on who thinks he has the right to dole out personal attacks as justice. Get a fucking grip.
Yeah, I got overinvested in this thread when people started calling me names, attacking my character, and basically posting shit like you have been. I’m letting you suck me into a debate I don’t really care about because now I feel like I’m defending myself, not my arguments. So I guess, fuck off, Miller. You’ve wasted enough of my time and energy.
Not all of us! I knew before I got my first tattoo that a sizable portion of the population didn’t like them. I am used to that. I’ve just never been called a “poser” or a “wanker” before.
But hey, it’s the Pit. It’s about what I expect. I don’t think there is anyone on here whose opinion of me is going to make me cry myself to sleep.
I’d go with bakayoro! バカヤロー in katakana rather than kanji. It’s not as esoteric, but more natural.
I used to think tattoos were stupid (early Mormon influence) but I see no problem with them now; although I don’t have any myself. For the ridiculous argument that what a person does to their own skin has anything to do with you, I would much prefer seeing even to most hideous, tasteless tattoo than to have lawmakers legislate what sex acts are allowed in the privacy of a bedroom.
I’ve seen some really funny combinations of kanji tattoos, where people picked characters out of the dictionary to try to create a meaning and failed miserably. With no bias against tattoos, I only view that in the same light as the countless wearers of funny English T-shirts. It’s just artwork, for chrissake.
I think it was clear that Rubystreak was saying the “sound of me laughing…” in the sense of laughing to herself, not literally laughing in someone’s face, which is what she had originally said. Don’t see how that makes her a liar.
No, you most definitely are NOT a wanker, and I’m sure your tattoos are tasteful and not childish or ill-considered. And even if they are, I still like you because you manage NOT to be an ass when discussing a topic dear to you. I care more about who a person is than external considerations, and I’ve said that numerous times in this thread to no avail. Believe me, I appreciate it.