Kiss
My fake eyelashes have a name, I just learned. Like lipstick and nail polish, paints and cars, my eyelashes have a name. I only started using fake lashes this year for the tv show, and didn’t notice until now, but now it’s all I see. KISS.
When I attended Japanese school, I found it odd there was no native word for kiss. The words for it are inadequate: kisu, an anglicism; or seppun, a sinocism. Compared to the native Japanese word for mouth—kuchi—the act of touching them against another’s was woefully lacking.
The simple lore of the Japanese language is that while the men in academic settings were busy parsing Chinese ideograms using katakana strokes, the women in the palace were inventing their own phonetic language in hiragana. I highly recommend The Pillow Book to anyone who wants to see ero-glyphic calligraphy.
In the 1910s and 1920s, the Japanese language was inventorying everything back into sinographic two-character idioms. Human Being, Corporation, Sentimentality. These words were rendered scientific by abstraction and signified by two-part kanji formats. The Koreans were doing it, too.
Maybe no one needs to describe kissing because it just happens when it just happens when it happens when.
