Monday, December 24, 2018

[sxruyqwf] Drill that will pierce the heavens, probe Uranus

"Uranus" is a common pun: your anus, and from there, further puns like Uranus probe (a hypothetical spacecraft).

The name of the Greek god Uranus means "heaven" (also "sky").

Is the "drill that will pierce the heavens" in Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann 天元突破グレンラガン a reference to the English pun?  One can imagine a game of telephone traversing English to Greek to Japanese and now back to English.  What is the iconic sentence in the original Japanese?

The Japanese name for planet Uranus is 天王星 (tennosei, heaven-king planet), so its name is a direct translation from Greek.  Incidentally the first two characters are pronounced the same as but spelled differently than 天皇 tenno emperor.

The word Tengen 天元 in the title is the same word as the center point in go 囲碁.  What does the word mean outside of the context of go?  In particular, how does it differ in meaning from just Ten 天?

What are the meanings of the katakana words in the title?  (We may officially never know; they might be Japanese puns.)  The internet suggests 紅蓮 guren, a word with possibly complicated connotations in Buddhism, so we won't try to define it in this brief post.  The most common word pronounced "ragan" seems to be 裸眼 "naked eye (i.e., unaided vision)".

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