r/PeterExplainsTheJoke 12h ago

Meme needing explanation Peter?

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1.4k Upvotes

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128

u/zappyguy111 12h ago

Looks like 公.

Doesn't mean much on its own, maybe grandpa?

57

u/AnalDilator 7h ago

Certainly not Chinese. If it was 公 (gōng), then the first two strokes would move from top to bottom.

However, you can see they were written from bottom to top. I don’t know any Chinese who would write it like this.

60

u/J3musu 7h ago

Wait... The direction of the stroke actually matters and should be notable in written Chinese? Wild

63

u/BotanicalNonsense 7h ago

Same with Japanese, Cantonese, and most other languages that use kanji; that's why calligraphy is such a huge thing in the East

26

u/CloudCuddler 7h ago

Yes and no. I'm no expert but I don't think brush strokes ever change meaning. Digital characters often don't show brush strokes clearly.

But yes, if you wrote it like this in class, calligraphy lessons or even to your parents, the stick is definitely coming out.

14

u/BotanicalNonsense 7h ago

Fair enough. I don't think it changes the meaning of the words, rather, the subtext, or can be seen as more inefficient and sloppy.

I also don't have any formal linguistic knowledge of the aforementioned languages, though, so take that with a grain of salt haha

10

u/sewsowsigh 7h ago

Yep and your teacher will yell at you if you get it wrong enough times

7

u/Visual-Flan-4098 6h ago

i got chewed when i did the wrong stroke for korean letters over and over by an ex. she said 'you have to write it like this. just like your letter have a certain way to write them'. i informed her we do not have stroke orders in english. our writing is all just 'make the outcome look like this'. her dad also was very confused by 7s if you crossed them or 4s if it wasnt slanted. he would think they were something else.

5

u/EcstaticZebra7937 6h ago

We actually do have a stroke order

4

u/Visual-Flan-4098 5h ago

ours, at best, is just to get kids to learn to write. after 1st or 2nd its as long as the letters look right, your good. there is no important to our stroke order. you can probably even grab a friend and will see them writing some letters differently than you do. 

0

u/EcstaticZebra7937 4h ago

That’s why students are so so slow with their writing

3

u/J3musu 4h ago

Sure, based on the direction we write in mostly, but if you choose to do your own thing and still make the right shape, most people aren't going to care.

3

u/LV_OR_BUST 3h ago

I was always catching hell about the direction of my Os for some reason. Now nobody cares, also I can count on my writing hand how many times I've picked up a pen or pencil this year.

1

u/titsngiggles69 1h ago

Good (legible) handwriting was more important before the computer era. Unconventional stroke order just makes your writing harder to read

2

u/skelo 5h ago

It's more about the right way to write it than that it's notable. If you wrote a line going the wrong direction it wouldn't make it a different word, it would just look weird and not be the "proper" way to write it. Generally you write from up to down and left to right

1

u/J3musu 4h ago

Being a native English speaker and knowing how many handwriting variations there are in my language, it's just kinda wild how strict others can be.

It also makes me think how I've heard stories of misspeaking in other languages by saying a word very slightly wrong, maybe with a different vowel sound or something. Crazy to me that small things like that can fully break communication in some languages while I can sit here and listen to 10 different accents of non-native English speakers who are pronouncong nearly every word in at least slight unusual/"wrong" ways, but I can still make out what they're saying and have a conversation. Some English speakers act like they can't, but many of them are just being bigots and asshats and not really trying. I have terrible auditory processing and can struggle with accents at times, but still figure it out.

2

u/zappyguy111 2h ago

It's more like spelling: if you spell a word wrong, you get yelled at by a teacher, if you put a stroke in the wrong place, it can change the meaning.

It helps with neatness and memorisation.

Frankly, I think were all talking about a guy or gal's jeans pockets rubbing against a frosty car.