Grossest Idiom Ever?
Last week at work I came across possibly the grossest idiom in existence – 爪(つめ)の垢(あか)を煎(せん)じて飲む. The first thing I did was turn to my trusty 慣用句 (かんようく) online dictionary. The interface could be better; the search engine is pretty good, but if that doesn’t find it, you have to narrow down the idiom by the first two kana via the menu on the left. Some of the idioms have their own pages, others are just given on a long page with other definitions. The best part is that the whole thing is in Japanese, which forces you to study and get a feel for how it works in Japanese, rather than learning a straight up translation.
This one has its own page, and the definition is: 優れた人の爪の垢を貰って薬として飲むという意味で、その人に肖（あやか）ろうとすること。
So, yes, you boil an awesome person’s fingernail crud and drink it as medicine so that you can be cool like them. Something like that. I had to look up 肖(あやか)ろう, and I think it means something like “be lucky.” Still getting used to the usage here, but I’m thinking it’s something like “I wanna be like Mike.” It can be put into basically any tense by changing 飲む – some of the frequently used tenses are 飲みたい, 飲ませる. The difference between these two is pretty drastic. With 飲みたい, the speaker thinks the person is so great, great enough that they’d drink their fingernail crud. With 飲ませる, someone is clearly lacking something that crud from fingernails of superlative person X could hopefully fix, and the person doing the causing thinks they should drink up. Gross.
Here’s a blog entry with actual usage. Always good practice to learn stuff.
It would be fun to write a fake article about the “recent boom” of Japanese “fingernail crud cafes.”
February 28th, 2009 at 1:30 pm
友達のジュリアからこのブログを紹介してもらいました。いつも楽しく読ませてもらっています。
爪の垢を煎じて飲む！確かにグロい表現に聞こえるでしょうね（笑）。ただ、多くの場合、Aさんに対して「Bの爪の垢でも煎じて飲めば！」と言ったりとか、別のCさんの前でAさんの悪口を言うときに「AはBの爪の垢でも煎じて飲んだ方がいいんだよ」と言ったりする例が殆どです。つまり、「誰かを他の誰かを引き合いに出して貶める場合」に使うことが多いと思います。紹介されていたブログは、この表現が稀に主体的に使われる例で、その場合でも普通は「爪の垢でも煎じてのみたいくらい」みたいな感じで、たとえであることを明確にして使うことが殆どです。
March 1st, 2009 at 8:39 pm
コメントありがとう！なるほど。実は初めて読んだときもちょっとした悪口として使われたと思う。「AさんをBさんの爪の垢を飲ませたい」というパターン。
Hisa makes a good point – the pattern is most frequently used as an insult when talking about someone who isn’t present. So, in front of person C you would say, “I wish person A was more like person B!/If only person A was more like person B!”
It can be used willingly by the subject as it is on the blog I linked to, but it’s rare.
Thanks for the comment!
July 28th, 2009 at 11:22 pm
In a scenario (profession, trade or any organization) where a rookie without a clue tends to blunder from one breach of etiquette after another, and where a sage advice clearly would be wasted, the only economic advice is to suggest such a concoction be consumed. But, this is said with one’s tongue in cheek only to underline the hopelessness of the endeavor.