flying someway for it. start again to be bositive way.

Narita, Japan

Literal translation: Moving through the air with wings in some way or manner for a thing previously mentioned or easily identified. Begin at least one more time by looking at the presence of qualities rather than their absence. 

We begin, questioning. Why are we flying? What is “it?”

The locale of Japan’s largest and busiest airport, Narita is both aorta and vena cava, streaming in masses of foreign visitors and rushing out Japan’s own wanderers. Each, in their own way, is flying somewhere, someway for “it.” Whether that “it” is quality time with a partner, securing a business deal, tasting new forms of deliciousness or bearing witness to the beauty of architecture abroad, flight is one way to attain those easily identifiable “it”s. However, it’s definitely not the only way. Fresh encounters can be happened upon everyday by changing up routines, knowledge can be expanded through deeper engagement, wheels of understanding can whirl through words spoken with unfamiliar people. All this in our own communities. Even if we want to leave, we can often find what we’re looking for by staying. 

That being said, I consider myself exceedingly fortunate to be able to travel to countries not my own. While exploring and living in Southeast Asia, I’ve noticed many foreign people, especially young people, who are looking for an “it” that is less easily known that that of the average tourist. Something perhaps they are missing from their lives at home: inner peaces and happinesses, profound relationships, gods, nirvana, love, answers to questions about the world or about themselves. Undoubtedly some are simply actualizing a capacity for escape. 

It’s possible all of these journeys begin someway with a negative: what is absent from my life? Some find their answers, their enlightenment. Some don’t.

No matter the reason one searches, the act of leaving our backdrops — blending our bodies into the scenery of another culture — surely brings us closer to “it.” We fill our hearts, minds, bodies, spirits, and memories with presence, with the imprint of somewhere else. We expand, we learn, we share, we sink roots in these new places. 

Our second sentence of “Start again to be bositive way” therefore becomes a mirror to our first, “flying someway for it.”

Ever more so because the ‘b’ and ‘p’ keys are their own mini-flight away, suggesting this is not some egregious typo. We must therefore investigate it as the semiotic clue that it is.

That means we have to be technical for a hot sec. The /b/ / /p/ switcheroo boils down to something called voice. In phonology, the word voice is used to talk about different sounds of speech. A phone is the smallest, most simple sound that distinguishes one word from another: like the /d/ and /m/ in ‘day’ and ‘may.’ Phones can be either voiced (vibes on your vocal chords) or unvoiced (no vibes). You can check out the absence when you make an /s/ sound and feel those good vibes by making a /z/ sound.

The /b/ and /p/ phones are in fancy phonetics terms called bilabial plosives (a stop that uses both your lips). Basically your vocal tract stops the flow of air and then releases it, making the sound. Crucially, /p/ just happens to be the voiceless bilabial plosive, enjoying a piña colada on its voice vacation, whereas the /b/ that makes up the lovely ‘bostive’ from our shirt is voiced — voice positive, voice present. In this light, ’bostive’ functions to literally and figuratively add voice to the voiceless. It’s a word that allows us to feel something inside — even if it’s just the vibrations of our vocal chords. 

When we travel, when we try new things, even when we wake up to another day of this wonderful thing we call life we are given the opportunity to start again. We are given a chance to once more look for the presence of (good) qualities rather than their absence. If that’s not a metaphor for the eternal “it,” then I don’t know what is. 

Habby voicing. 

money islke mush not not good kcept it espread.

The incredible, spreadable mush. Mush is meal, especially cornmeal, boiled in water or milk until it forms a thick, soft mass, or until it is stiff enough to mold. More common in its usage, mush refers to anything that is of a thick, soft mass. Onomatopoetic in nature, this word hails from mid-late 17th century America, a time during which the new residents of America were rendering all sorts of things from the so-called New World into thick masses. Mush can also refer to a pack of (adorable) dogs pulling a sled through snow, with origins in Canadian French from the word marchons meaning let’s go!, but it’s unlikely our shirt designer had this meaning in mind.

A double negative of “not not” in English produces an affirmative statement, but in other languages, multiple negation intensifies the sentence, producing something called negative concord. Here we understand our sentence simply as: Money is like mush, it’s only good [when] it has been spread around, a delightful paraphrase of Francis Bacon’s1625 quote, “Money is like muck — not good unless spread.”

My rendering of this phrase is not perfect. For one thing, the quality of things that are mushy doesn’t always translate to that of spreadable things. English’s textural specificity here is acting against me. But there are many things with textures similar to that of mush which are most delicious when their surface area has been maximized via the technique known as spreading. Examples of spreadable deliciousness include Nutella, Trader Joe’s Speculoos Cookie Butter, cashew butter, actual butter, Vegemite, and marmalade. The jury is out on whether Nutella or cookie butter is best enjoyed by spreading or by the spoon (or ladle) full, but I think most would agree with the general principle of “spreader is better” when thinking about Vegemite or actual butter (Alabama State Fair and your deep-fried butter on a stick, I’m looking at you).

Things that are meant for spreading are actually best when spread and not lumped together, and, as this shirt reiterates, the same can be said of money. Indeed, the gap between the rich and the poor is widening globally, with new millionaires popping up everyday. One disturbing statistic that exemplifies the intensity of this inequality is that the 85 richest people have the same collected wealth as the poorer half of this world. Three and a half billion people whose everything is equally valued (monetarily speaking) to as few people as there are ways to tie a tie. 

The other matter that our shirt clearly alludes to in its text is the nature of the differences between Eastern and Western culture. Take any Anthropology 101 class and you will hear about how countries like Japan and South Korea are highly group-oriented, cooperative, intuitive, and communal. 

I have personally borne witness to this collectivistic culture in many forms. In Sarawak, I am met with a face of shock when someone finds out I’ve driven some long distance alone, especially at night; if I’m eating or drinking by myself, I am joined, by whomever, without any concern as to whether I wanted to be without company. But perhaps most relevantly to the concept explored by the shirt that demonstrates the group-oriented nature of the culture in which I find myself is the Malay word tong-tong, literally meaning bins. It refers to the process of collecting money from parties in order to pay for something shared. An idea so nice they named it twice. This isn’t to say that a similar type of collection doesn’t occur back in the USA, it does. Individuals tally up what they owe and one person gets stuck with the nominally arduous task of mathing it all up. 

There is something to be said, however, for the instantiation of concept into word. To press one particular part of the vast world of abstraction that characterizes our daily life into concise sounds has always been of interest to me. Language is curious in that it paradoxically becomes more entropic as it becomes more specific. You come to words like the German fernweh: feeling homesick for a place you have never been to, or mamihlapinatapai in Yaghan, a language once spoken in Tierra del Fuego, which roughly means, the look shared between two people who want to initiate something but are too afraid to start. Even the specificity of the root word ihlapi (pronounced [iɬapi]), meaning "to be at a loss as what to do next,” suggests to me that both hesitance and patience may have been important concepts in the culture practiced by the Yagán people, or at least important enough that the idea was given its very own sounds and meaning. The representation of the concept of tong-tong into the Malay word tong-tong tells me that sharing in this culture is highly relevant.

What this is all to say is that words themselves are indicative of linguistic saliency. This blog is devoted to exploring decisions made by tee shirt designers and giving those choices of letters and words meaning, because these shirts, in the nature of them existing are also salient of particular themes, ideas, and narratives. They are not created and distributed and worn in a vacuum.

Ultimately, this shirt reminds us of three things: spelling is far from perfect, language is beautiful, and that when thinking about money, whether it is like mush or like muck, spread it and share it.

do cool for chooi.

It sounds like a campaign slogan and is most likely just a bastardized form of “Too Cool for School,” but at face value I have questions, namely, who is Chooi? And why should we “do cool” for him? 

Choi, a name similar to Chooi, is a common last name in Korean (최) and Chinese (崔), meaning top or most. According to the ever-helpful Wikipedia, 최 and 崔 are anglicized to be Choi, and sometimes also Choe. Choi is a surprisingly popular last name in Korea, the country’s fourth most popular after Kim, Lee, and Park, though it accounts for just less than five percent of Korean surnames. 

The Korean concept of clans, or bon-gwan, used to distinguish different groups of people that happen to share the same family name becomes relevant here, as there are over 150 distinct clans that use the Choi name. Maybe one of them even sports the ‘Chooi’ derivative. Different clans trace their lineages back to different Chois, among them scholars, military generals, and leaders, mostly during the Silla period in Korean history. 

Silla was one of the Three Kingdoms of Korea, arguably the most interesting not only for it being one of the world’s longest sustained dynasties but also for its use of bone ranking, a wild Korean caste-like system that dictated everything from who you could marry to the color of your clothing, size of your crib, and what type of whip you could be pulling around — if your bone was ranked high enough, maybe your carriage would be pulled on humanback. Silla spanned almost a millennium, from 56 BCE until 935 CE, as described in the chronicle of early Korean history, the Samguk Sagi, and by the time it was over and done with everyone breathed a massive sigh of relief.

The most badass of the Chois was undoubtedly Choi Chi-won, or Choe Chiwon, noted philosopher, poet, and Confucian official. After being pretty unsuccessful at trying to reform the then-declining Silla state in his youth, old man Choe decided to become a Buddhist hermit and lived out his days building pavilions, spreading around bamboo, and composing odes to the natural world. 

It’s this most famous Choi that our Chooi is probably referring to. But what does “doing cool” for him mean? Given that he was essentially a failed reformer, the Silla government being too backward by the time he returned home after spending his twenties in China, doing cool in its current sense of relaxed and calm would probably mean living and letting live, to stop trying to change an already flawed system. 

An older Choe might say that doing cool encompasses the things one does to relax; for him it was scattering about trees, reading more, and doing what he loved: writing poems and history. After he fell in love with one particular vista, Choe built a pavilion overlooking its beach and engraved some calligraphy into one of its rocks. This must be what it means to do cool. 

Whether it’s for Choe, for Chooi, or for you, hopefully this page from Korean history is enough to remind you that to do cool is ultimately about being good to yourself.

what.

This. The inaugural tee. The tee that elicited sufficient semiotic and cultural confusion to inspire this blog. 

When going to a new country, especially one where English is embedded but not ingrained, there will always be a fascinating linguistic exchange worthy of much academic ink. How some words survive translation is intriguing. For example, in Malaysia the word "take" is used as a catch all for eating and drinking, as in "Do you take spicy?" or "Do you take coffee?" or "Oh, you do take garlic." Establishing truth is a concept that seems to be imperative to Malaysia — every day I am asked "Is it true?" of various things I say, and, on the other hand, conspiracy theories have been entrenched in Malaysian culture for years and years.

But nothing has remained as perplexing as the myriad shirts, shorts, and hats I have seen whose English is not unlike that of a drunken toddler's. 

Anyone can put words on cloth. A shirt ripped from your childhood memories once donated ends up covering the back of a young boy in Lesotho or Vietnam, where Joey's Bar Mitzvah theme is suddenly irrelevant.* I've seen shirts that just plainly say FUCK YOU. One of my favorite shirt-related impressions from Kuala Lampur was seeing a pregnant woman wearing a shirt dress that said It all happened in a *Starbucks Coffee logo* and I couldn't help but think whether this was a public announcement of the location of her soon-to-be-birthed child's conception or a premonition of where its birth would be or neither. 

With this shirt, I tried my best to make sense of it. One explanation is that it could be a poke at how difficult learning English as a second language is. How some combinations of characters are barely justifiable. The "conscious uncoupling" of pronunciation and phonetics. 

I even attempted to decode its message with a cryptograph solver. It's possible it means "french rente sacne means chinee thente wan." There are enough words in there with some semblance of a relationship to meaning when stringed together. Perhaps it's a cipher. Or perhaps no one has ever given this particular shirt this much thought. 

My only other explanation is that this is a very sophisticated and self-referential response to the pervasive nonsense that occupies space on fabric. With "WHAT," we are offered an opportunity to consider how trivial language can be when it's mass produced and easily discardable. The strings of letters are an obvious articulation of the idea that we can find meaning out of nonsense, which is exactly what I am trying to achieve here. This shirt is performative. It enacts our ability to challenge it, to find significance in the inconsequential, to grant us a moment of perilous gravity in the seemingly safe. Truth or dare.