243 - Biolent Biolence

If you watch anime for any length of time, the odds that you will hear the word for "to kill" is pretty high. It's:

殺す
ころす
to kill

You might even hear it in the slightly less than polite phrase "I'm gonna kill you!"

殺してやる!
ころして やる!
I'm gonna kill you!
Literally: "kill (and) + give."
Note: やる can also mean "to do," though here it is a variation of when やる means "to give." Don't use it when talking about giving people stuff, though, as it implies the listener is far below you. So use it, for example, if you're giving something to an animal.

On occasion, though, you might hear characters in a show adding a ぶっ- to the front of their words.

For example:

ぶっ殺す!
ぶっころす!
I'm gonna kill you!
Literally: "(violently) kill."

Adding the prefix ぶっ to some verbs will give it the nuance of violence or beating. In our example above, it sounds like the speaker is going to beat the listener to death or something. Not the nicest thing to say, so let's avoid it when talking to our teachers, bosses, and so on.

Or not. Your funeral.

Let's look at some other verbs ぶっ can latch onto, giving them an intense, violent nuance...


てめぇ、ぶっ飛ばすぞ!
てめぇ、 ぶっとばす ぞ!
I'm gonna beat your ass. // I'm gonna beat the $%^! out of you!
Literally: "you + strike and send flying + ぞ."
Note: てめぇ is one of the most offensive words for "you" in Japanese. I've never used it. As for 飛ばす (とばす // to [make] fly), it's the transitive version of 飛ぶ (とぶ // to fly). Add a ぶっ to the front, and it sounds like we're going to hit something so hard that it flies. It sounds kind of silly in English, but you sometimes hear it when someone is making a threat in a TV show or manga.


ホリーが貧血でぶっ倒れたって。
ホリー が ひんけつ で ぶったおれた って。
Apparently Holly passed out from anemia.
Literally: "Holly + が + anemia + で + fell flat + って."
Note: This translation is just so-so. The nuance is that she lost consciousness, but when she did, she fell pretty hard.

For more about falling on your face in Japanese, you should check out the article about my hospital visit in Japan. It's a graphic, painful read... so not recommended for ye faint of heart.


パソコンぶっ壊れた。
パソコン ぶっこわれた。
The computer broke.
Literally: "PC + broke."
Note: The ぶっ doesn't really change the meaning much here; it just sounds a bit more casual with it attached to the front.


彼氏の前でおならぶっ放しちゃった...
かれし の まえ で おなら ぶっぱなしちゃった...
I (accidentally) ripped a huge fart right in front of my boyfriend...
Literally: "boyfriend + の + front + で + fart + set free."
Note: Adding ぶっ here makes it clear that this was not a small, graceful fart. Also, using ~ちゃった at the end gives the nuance that it was not intentional.


ぶっかけうどん食べたいなー。
ぶっかけ うどん たべたい なー。
I feel like a fat bowl of udon.
Literally: "thrown on top + udon + want to eat + なー."

I struggled to figure out the difference between うどん and ぶっかけうどん, but I couldn't really find any good explanation. Sometimes the two are interchangeable, but ぶっかけうどん doesn't sound very fancy. For example, if you make うどん at home, and then you just throw all sorts of things onto it that you found in the fridge, then you could say ぶっかけうどん.

Here are a bunch of photos I found online for ぶっかけうどん:

Part of this "less than classy" nuance is that ぶっかけうどん is not likely to have an assortment of small dishes surrounding it (something common in Japan). It would most certainly not be talking about this うどん, for instance:

Doesn't make sense? Yeah, that's how I feel too.

But don't blame me. Blame Japanese people.


あの子ぶっ飛んでるね。
あの こ ぶっとんでる ね。
She's a bit off the wall, isn't she?
Literally: "that + child [=girl] + is flying + ね."

Agh! This was hard to translate.

You may be wondering why sticking ぶっ onto the front of "is flying" could mean "off the wall."

The answer is: I have no idea.

But if you look up ぶっ飛んでる人 (ぶっとんでるひと // [lit. is flying person]), then you'll see images like these:



...which are just wonderful.

In fact, it's not necessarily mean to call someone ぶっ飛んでる if you mean it in a respectful way.

For example, if your coworker rolls into work one day and says, "I quit! I'm gonna go live on an Alpaca farm in South America and grow hot peppers." Well, that's pretty awesome. A little off the wall, yeah. Maybe hard to understand for some of us less fly people (<--lame joke). But not a bad thing.

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