Hey, some nose is coming out of your nose
How do you say “runny nose” in Japanese? It’s 「はなが出ている」. Hana ga dete iru. Literally, “some nose is coming out”!
The first time I heard this I couldn’t believe my ears. The meaning was obvious—”your nose is running”—but how in the world could the word for “nose” also be used for the nasal mucus coming out of it? But it is.
It even has its own character—洟, pronounced hana, the same as the word for nose itself. So we can say 鼻から洟が出でいる/hana kara hana ga dete-iru/“some nose is coming out of your nose”. (It can also be read hanamizu (鼻水) or the less common hanajiru (鼻汁—nose juice?), which are other words for the snot involved here.) The character 洟 is phono-semantic (in other words, the 夷 on the right contributes the phonetics), but you could be forgiven for imagining that the vertical line is a nose, with mucus dripping back and forth along it down towards the nostrils at the bottom.
This is the runny stuff. When it hardens, into what is called a booger in English, that would of course be 鼻くそ/hanakuso. Japanese has no medical term for boogers (although it does have one for runny nose: 鼻漏, pronounced birō and meaning “leaky nose”). The くそ/kuso in hanakuso is not the “poop” variety! In this case it refers to “gunk”. You can have gunk in your eyes (目くそ/mekuso, or 目ヤニ/meyani), or in your ears (耳くそ/mimikuso), or even in your teeth (歯くそ/hakuso). If you criticize someone for something that you’re also at fault for, that would be 目糞鼻糞を笑う/mekuso hanakuso wo warau—“laughing at someone’s eye gunk or nose boogers”. (Try working that into a conversation.) “Gunk” is just one of several meanings for kuso other than poop; another one is simply ”very”, as in heta-kuso, or very sloppy, one of my favorite words.
Wiping your runny nose (or someone else’s) would be 鼻水を拭く/hanamizu wo fuku or 鼻水をぬぐう/hanamizu wo nuguu. Some ancient Chinese person with too much time on their hands also invented the character 挮, hardly ever seen in Japanese but also read as nuguu, which means wiping away both tears and nasal mucus, like you would do for your little brother (弟) after a crying tantrum—get it?
If the kid’s snot blows out of his nose in the form of a bubble, which in English we call, well, snot bubble, that would be 鼻提灯/hana chōchin—a “nose lantern”. Now you know.
But we haven’t addressed the fundamental question: why would Japanese use the same word for the organ (nose) and its secretion (mucus)? Is this just an accident? Or is there some principle at work here? We’ll take up this important question next post.
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