Something in the vicinity of 50% of the houses in my neighborhood are inhabited by dog owners, and on any given day there will be dozens of poodles, chihuahuas, Jack Russell terriers, labradors, German shepherds, samoyeds, Lhasa Apsos and mixed breed animals walking their owners up and down the street, stopping to sniff every blade of grass, squatting to whiz, or depositing their waste on the ground for a human to pick up and dispose of. We are a responsible bunch. You occasionally come across a fugitive dog turd, but mostly people are good about keeping the sidewalks and lawns tidy.
In the mail today a package came from China, via Mexico City (importado por importadora Amazon México, S. de R. L. de C. V. Juan Salvador Agraz No. 73, Piso 5, Colonia Santa Fe Cuajimalpa, Delegación Cuajimalpa de Morelos, Ciudad de México, Distrito Federal C. P. 05348) (See screenshot of building at left - it's between the Volvo and the Renault dealerships.)
Taku ordered the poop bags in December 2021. I don't know whether the delay was in China, in Mexico, or here in the USofA. No matter. They are here now, all 900 of them.
What caught my eye was how poop bags is rendered in the various languages Amazon chooses to provide for the international set, and the varying degrees (or complete lack thereof) of euphemism involved.
Besides English, where we speak of "waste", there is the Japanese:
愛犬用処理袋 - aiken yō shoribukuro - literally "love dog use disposal bags"
(And don't miss reason lost-count-how-many for loving the Japanese language - the fact that "pet dog" is rendered "love dog.")
Then there is the hyper-avoidance euphemism, Italian, which renders this object
sacchetti igienici (hygenic sacks/bags).
You could get more euphemistic, I suppose, if you called them "butterfly wing bags" or maybe "cherry pie bags" but "hygenic" is going some.
And at the other extreme are the zero-euphemism languages, French and Spanish:
sacs à excréments and bolsas para excrementos.
German uses the word
Kotbeutel,
Kot being the standard translation for feces, i.e., not vulgar, like shit, but not a word to toss into a conversation while sipping tea and eating cucumber sandwiches. Beutel is German for sack/bag.
Back in the day when I was teaching a seminar at Keio University called "International responses to the AIDS crisis" we marveled at how differently people put out the word that the best approach to take toward the disease was not to mistreat the victims, but to practice safe sex. For Brazilians, this meant showing pictures of loving couples, adding some salsa music to the background, and then the words, "protect those you love by using a condom." In Japan, it was comic book cartoon characters, (i.e., at two levels of euphemistic remove) one male, one female (it wouldn't do to suggest, back in those early days, that AIDS was affecting same-sex people having sex), with the message "Please remember to use a condom." The French were handing out free condoms at railroad ticket offices to people buying long-distance vacation tickets. And the Dutch? The Dutch message was, "When you fuck, use a condom!"
That came back to mind when running down the list of Amazon languages on the poop bag box. I was all ready for strontzakken - which would be the zero-euphemism Dutch term for "shit bags." Instead, I found the (at least to me) utterly delightful
poepzakjes "poop sacks."
Amazon didn't stop there. You know that sealing tape around the box that normally tells you, if the contents are "Fragile," that you should "Handle with Care"? This time the tape read:
Handle with cheer.
I kid you not.
The box contained 900 bags/Beutel/sacs/bolsas/zakjes/sacchetti/fukuro. Our two girls don't poop with each walk, but sometimes go early in the morning or late at night in the backyard. We pick those dropped treasures up when we see them, of course, but we occasionally miss one here and there and leave it to the sunshine to dry them up and roll them away. But mostly we make very high use of this wonderful modern invention, the poop bag. When the girls were young, I suggested (obviously before giving it sufficient thought) that we should not be using plastic, but picking the turdies up with paper towels and carrying them to the toilet. Taku quickly disabused me of this false attempt to be environmentally conscious, reminding me that this is California, and flushing toilets was bad enough when all you did was pee, but adding four flushes a day for dog turds was seriously irresponsible. So poop bags (which are sealed tight and tossed into the trash bin) it is.
Given the eleven month delay in shipping, we're figuring it's time right about now to place another order.
The question is, should we be boycotting China and Amazon and buying our poop bags elsewhere?
That would be my inclination at the present time. But I love getting packages delivered with cheer.
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