The other day I went into a store and saw an advertisement for a chair that used bags of compressed air to massage your body. What caught my eye wasn’t the design of the chair, but the weird English name they’d given it: PLIM UP. It’s a good example of how the Japanese love to get creative with English product names, giving birth to linguistic concepts that would never occur to native speakers since little things like grammar don’t get in the way. Hence, you have a floor cleaner called Quickle Wiper, microwaved chicken with the name of Perky Bit, a map company called Mapple, a construction company that sold houses under the brand name of “Home, Homer, Homest,” and the popular sports drink Pocari Sweat. It’s funny how easily you can grow accustomed to some of these odd-sounding names, like the Sony Walkman, which must have sounded really weird to people when it first came out, or the Rebuild of Evangelion movies that are so awesome despite the strange name.
When you think about it, “Fate/stay night” is a pretty strange name to get used to, too.
