My site stats say someone found my page by searching “synaeresis 縮む” and since that was probably because my Twitter feed shows up on the side (and has since scrolled off) I thought I had better make a more permanent cooking mitten memorial.
Last month I bought a pair of adorable kitten-and-cherry-blossom print green oven mitts from Daiso, and was baffled by a line on the tag, which I tweeted about. The tweets in question:
Cutest cooking mitten in the world; sadly prone to synaeresis, however http://twitpic.com/2soisv
The label says 又、多少縮む場合もあります。How that became “This product has the possibility of synaeresis” I couldn’t easily tell you
Loosely translated, it means “Also, there are conditions under which it may shrink slightly.” Not being a chemistry geek or, apparently, enough of a linguistics geek to have heard the term before, synaeresis was entirely unknown to me, but shrinking fabrics — that’s not so bad.
I wonder if it was a machine translation… How would Google Translate handle the same line?
By the way, I got the pink bunny ones too, which are just as cute; it would be worth shrinking slightly to have such a cheerful kitchen. I did get something on the thumb of one of my green ones, but I haven’t had the courage to try to wash it yet.
