My Magic keywords entry is still being worked on so here is some more miscellany 
Regular reader/commenter Locksleyu wrote this comment yesterday:
駄洒落
“dajare”
pun
Locksleyu writes Self Taught Japanese. It is a very well-written and deep blog which I thoroughly recommend checking out.
Locksleyu is a mysterious character to me. They are very good at Japanese and I think perhaps live in Japan, with a family. But that’s about all I know! I suppose I am piecing together more about this person from reading their blog entries…
One of my favourites that they have written is this entry on a Japanese book called “Bum Detective”. I have that kind of sense of humour where a detective whose head is a bottom is utterly, utterly hilarious to me. I thought Locksleyu’s review was excellent and I especially liked the finer points on the translation of the book and presentation of it in the original language.
At one point in the entry Locksleyu leaves a sentence’s meaning as an “exercise to the reader”. This seems good to look at to squeeze some Japanese into today’s entry.
The sentence is 失礼こかせていただきます (shitsurei kokasete itadakimasu) and I found it quite hard to translate neatly so let’s look at the component parts and see where we can get with it.
失礼
“shitsurei”
rudeness (I believe this can also be a shorthand for “excuse me“)
こかせて
“kokasete”
to let loose for example: a fart (!)
いただきます
“itadakimasu”
to receive, to get, to accept, to take (humble)
Itadakimasu is most commonly known to people as a word that is said before eating. However, I am pretty sure that meaning is not the intended one for today’s sentence so will we ignore it for now.
Putting the three above together into a single clear English sentence is difficult, isn’t it? We can tell broadly that Bum Detective is saying in a very polite fashion that he is about to fart, but the precise subtlety of the wording isn’t clear to me. I will give this very loose translation:
失礼こかせていただきます
shitsurei kokasete itadakimasu
I am about to let loose something rude!
I am not entirely satisfied with that as I feel like I have taken license with the tenses (“I am about to”) but it is my best attempt for now!
Today’s cover picture is a Japanese dish associated with where I lived. I want to talk tomorrow about “itadakimasu” as it came up today and we had to skip over the most “usual” meaning.
Annotranslate 