Greetings from August 2020, dear readers. We’re still operating mostly indoors, although we have a bike now and the weather in Chicago has been good, which means that the city is out and about (for better or worse) and there are patios with draft beer and fine food. Winter is within sight, so we’re trying to enjoy the warmth we have left.

But virtual events are still a thing. We’re digital. The memes are flowing, including this gem, which I snipped from Twitter on May 11 (two days before Elon Musk tweeted it):

I know next to nothing about Dragonball, so I got curious about what the original Japanese might be. After some searching, it turns out that the English is completely original to memedom and does not appear in the anime or manga…in that form.

Japanese websites have attributed the line, which popped up in memes in 2012, to the Japanese その変身をあと2回もオレは残している (Sono henshin o ato nikai mo ore wa nokoshite iru, With that transformation, I have two more remaining), which comes from Frieza in this panel:

I can’t seem to track down which manga issue this comes from, but a fan in this forum has posted quotes from episodes that seem to suggest it was translated pretty straightforward in the anime as “And I still have two more transformations remaining!”

To be honest, “This isn’t even my final form” is a pretty good rendering of the Japanese! It feels appropriately dramatic. Maybe something like “There’s more where that came from!” or “You haven’t seen anything yet!” would work as well.

Although, in complete context, “And I still have two more transformations remaining! Do you even understand what that means?” feels spot on.

The forum quotes also suggest that whoever made the meme was basically paraphrasing the actual translation rather than creating something entirely new.

But whoever created that initial meme did tap into something. It’s funny how pieces of language can go viral. It feels so natural, like there’s a momentum waiting to happen that needs only the softest push to set it in motion.