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DON'T ask difficult questions!

 

OK, there's lots of stories out there about this one.

 

1. It comes from the H of Hentai, meaning 'perverted'.

 

2. It comes from a mispronunciation of "You're a letch".

 

3. It comes from WWII vintage soldier's slang - sukebe's first kanji is the kanji for 'help', a word which some soldiers were likely to know. Filthy soldier's talk, by a convoluted etymology, came to be called 'etchi'.

 

The last one of these stories claims that etchi became common among civvies in 50s, knocking at least the first story out of the running. (Shows how much I know - see the link below). The second story is just implausible, as I think the expression 'letch' was probably not current amongst English speakers in Japan in the 50s.

 

So the 3rd one seems most plausible to me.

 

Damn, after writing all this out, I find there's already a version of this in English on the Web; http://home.attbi.com/~kagamix2/H_does_not_mean_hentai/theories.html

 

It also seems that this is quite a popular conundrum on the Japanese web (which I HATE looking at by the way - where is that unique design sense of the Japanese??)

 

As I said DON'T ask difficult questions!

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