More strange English

It is after 10pm (just about past my Cinderella hour – please excuse any rambling) and I'm up waiting for my husband to arrive with our guests from the airports. What better thing to keep me awake than write a blog post!

 I want to tell you about a couple of interesting English-orgin word-usages I've experienced this week.

The first I spotted mid-week. At Curves, my gym, there is always a lot of posters around. Quite different from the Australian branch that I patronised last year. I cannot read many of them, but one group of posters I saw this week I could figure out, piecing together enough Japanese to understand that it was about. They were celebrating the 1,000th Curves branch opening in Japan. Pretty impressive in under six years. The trouble came on the certificate-like poster. It looked something like this:

Curves

1000

Anniversary

Hmmm. I looked up anniversary in my Macquarie dictionary and it couldn't possibly be used like this.

The next one is a corruption of the word "counselling". I went for another haircut (shorter still) at a different salon. After I stated my business, I waited for about three minutes and then they hustled me in front of a mirror for "counselling". It consisted of me trying to tell them what I'd like done with my hair.

Apart from the work attached to it, the practise actually makes more sense than I've previously experienced in Japan. Maybe because I've typically gone to bottom-end hairdressers – aka cheap! This one is obviously a little more upmarket. My experience has usually been – someone washes your hair, then a different person who hasn't see you with dry hair comes to cut your hair. They inevitably assume my hair is straight instead of wavy (probably partly a product of the fact that Japanese hair is fairly straight and coarse) and when they're finished cutting they blow dry it completely straight. Generally my family don't recognise me when I come home.

11pm Well, visitors have arrived, so it is off to bed before a crazy day with a nine-person household tomorrow.