Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2011 June 5

= June 5 =

Crossword puzzle stumper
I'm a pretty avid crossword puzzle fan. I've just completed a puzzle but one clue makes no sense to me, even after seeing the answer. The clue is "merch table merch" and the answer is "tee". Puzzled over this puzzler in the puzzle (←I really enjoyed writing that), I googled the clue in quotes, and looked up "merch" in dictionary.com, finding nothing in both cases. Anyone have some light to shed? Thanks.--108.54.17.250 (talk) 02:54, 5 June 2011 (UTC)
 * All I can say is that 'merch' is often short for 'merchandise', meaning 'goods'. Maybe this helps? --  KägeTorä - (影虎)  ( TALK )  02:59, 5 June 2011 (UTC)
 * I think it does help. A merch table is a table or stand set up at band concerts selling fan merchandise . One of their most popular items of "merch" are T-shirts. Another colloquial term for T-shirt is simply "tee". So the tee (T-shirt) is one example of a merch table's "merch", or "merch table merch". ---Sluzzelin talk  03:14, 5 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Ah, thank you, Makes perfect sense now.--108.54.17.250 (talk) 03:34, 5 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Ooh, I parsed that incorrectly, otherwise I would have got it. I coupled 'table' with the second instance of 'merch', to get 'table merch', which was giving me visions of either add-ons for tables, or 'tableware', and I was overwhelmingly tempted to use the first instance of 'merch' as a verb..... Anyway, well done! --  KägeTorä - (影虎)  ( TALK )  13:24, 5 June 2011 (UTC)

Japanese name "Hero"
One of the auditioners for last week's episode of So You Think You Can Dance was a Japanese woman whose name was spelled in the chiron as "Hero". Is that even a possibility for a Japanese name? And if it was "Hiro", isn't that a male name? The Mark of the Beast (talk) 18:48, 5 June 2011 (UTC)


 * "Hero" doesn't seem likely as the normal romanisation of a Japanese name, but since the Japanese name Hiro pronounced by an English speaker sounds rather like the English word "Hero", I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that some Japanese with that name chose to transliterate it "Hero". Compare Stomu Yamashta, whose name reads "Tsutomu Yamashita" in a systematic transliteration, but who prefers to spell it in a way that English speakers are more likely to get it right.


 * The name Hiro seems to be both male and female, judging by the examples in the article --ColinFine (talk) 23:36, 5 June 2011 (UTC)


 * I had to go hunting for "Chyron", as I had no idea what it might mean. I found it on Chiron (disambiguation). --ColinFine (talk) 23:39, 5 June 2011 (UTC)


 * Agreed, I've never heard that term either, I just call them "captions". Unfortunately, I haven't heard of many of the other terms used for the same thing, so apparently there's little agreement of what text under an image on TV should be called.  (Although closed caption seems to be the agree-upon term for text you can turn on and off.) StuRat (talk) 23:52, 5 June 2011 (UTC)
 * I've heard of closed captioning because I work in the TV industry. The usual word in the UK is 'subtitles' --ColinFine (talk) 18:38, 7 June 2011 (UTC)