shi-shi
n.— «In Hawaii there is a similar thing. When people (esp. old women) have to go to the bathroom they will say “I gotta five-four-four.” Say “5-4-4” in Japanese and it’s “go shi-shi.”» —“Re: Hayari Kotoba (Fad Expressions)” by Maiko Covington Usenet: soc.culture.japan Nov. 17, 1992. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
It was a dark and stormy night. So begins the long and increasingly convoluted prose of Edwards Bulwer-Lytton’s best-known novel. Today the annual Bulwer-Lytton Contest asks contestants for fanciful first sentences that are similarly...
Enthusiastic book recommendations! Martha’s savoring the biography of Alexander von Humboldt, the 19th-century explorer, polymath, and naturalist who revolutionized our understanding of nature and predicted the effects of human activity on...