Which word begins with "y" and looks like an axe in this picture? (2017)

[thedrake]

I was the one who solved this. It was an exciting time

[snapcaster]

That was the most thorough stackexchange answer i've ever read. Thanks for the entertainment

[umanwizard]

Is it solved? My reading was we still don't understand why a Chinese manufacturer took some random words from Swedish.

[lwhi]

Well done for completing God's own work.

[thedrake]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14672359

[Levitating]

I am confused why jkej concluded that "the pictures from the second source are better explained in Swedish" from Hedstrom's response. As you discovered earlier, the swedish translations for cat or dog wouldn't even be Katt or Hund on this ball.

[phpnode]

I would bet that the Chinese manufacturer that cloned the design never had one of the original balls in their possession in the first place. They probably saw photos of the ball online, copied the design as closely as possible and googled some clipart to fill in the letters that weren't visible in the photos. That clipart was Swedish, maybe by coincidence but probably intentionally.

[xxs]

Pretty much. Although the toys for young kids (at least in the EU) are quite regulated, including the plastics that can be used. Other than that, I'd have immediately considered a mistake - it's designed for kids, it should be obvious. No need for extensive research or a question on the interwebs.

[lolinder]

Apparently this was discussed here while the investigation was ongoing, and an HN user (thedrake) was responsible for finding the ball on alibaba:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14672359

[codetrotter]

> I think the manufacturer of your son's ball mixed in a Swedish word

I found this super unconvincing at first. But they just kept goin. And going. And going. And the more I scrolled and the more I read, I started to think that they are right. And by the end I was fully convinced!

Well worth reading.

Thanks for sharing, OP!

[kelnos]

Same! But then I read another answer further down that suggested it might be a Chinese word for axe, romanized in pinyin as yuè (for 鉞). Since the knock-off ball seems to have been made by a Chinese company, that seems more likely to me.

That doesn't explain the weird u-boat thing, though.

[WJW]

First comment on the answer:

> This is quite the most extraordinary stack exchange answer that I've ever seen.

And I couldn't agree more. Well worth perusing if you (like me) usually only check the comments on HN.

[Jun8]

No, although this answer is awesome and very well researched, it cannot match the famous answer to the question about parsing HTML using regular expressions :-) : https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open....

BTW, I got curious about the highest scored answer and this meta answer explains how to find it: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/266570. The highest scored answer is this one: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11227809/why-is-processi... (of course this is related to teh size of the community)

[qiqitori]

Here's another question with an answer that blew my mind just the other day; not nearly as long though: https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/283546/does-hagrid...

[saaaaaam]

I’ve just read a dissertation about a plastic ball. I’m not sure what I think about that. It’s a mixture of impressed, horrified and bemused…

[BLKNSLVR]

Led me to this, previously unknown-to-me, pot of gold: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_as_She_Is_Spoke

"Nobody can add to the absurdity of this book, nobody can imitate it successfully, nobody can hope to produce its fellow; it is perfect."

[londons_explore]

In a way it is disappointing... Almost certainly, the person who drew this axe is still alive today. There are ~8 billion people alive today, so it is a simple matter of figuring out who to ask.

Yet, while everyone might be only 6 handshakes away from everyone else (on average), we do not have sufficient human connectivity to locate this person, even with hundreds of people putting at least a little thought/effort into identifying the artist.

[viraptor]

If you're into this kind of content, https://www.reddit.com/r/RBI/ may be fun. There's lots of trivial stuff, but you can find many deep investigations like in this submission too.

[dlandis]

> And I couldn't agree more. Well worth perusing if you (like me) usually only check the comments on HN.

And in classic fashion, of course the moderators locked it as "off topic".

[laborcontract]

In this case, only checking the comments on HN brings about a feeling of dismay at the sad state of comments on HN.

People should indeed read the top answer. I assumed it ended after the first paragraph and only after your comment read the rest of it. Quite a rabbit hole and great investigation!

[TheEaterOfSouls]

I feel like this video about the Casio VL-1 demo melody has a similar vibe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZCwrdseXKI The fact that people do this much research/investigation to find answers to questions like this is pretty cool.

[primitivesuave]

I wholeheartedly agree as well. The only nitpick I'd have on this incredible dissertation is on the "U" association with "U-boat" - this is an anglicized form of the German word "Unterseeboot" (undersea boat) which was itself shortened to "U-boot" (presumably the etymology of the Swedish "ubåt"). The first known use of the term "U-boat" is 1914, while the Germans and Swedish armed forces were commissioning submarines around a decade prior (in 1906 and 1904 respectively).

[xxs]

Trying to force a research/speculation on a mistake hardly deserves the most extraordinary answer.

A better approach: the ball, likely, can be traced to the company producing it. The toys for very young kids tend to be regulated, hence expensive. Contacting the company would be a direct approach, significantly improving the yield to provide a correct answer.

[mmastrac]

Wasn't yew wood used for wooden handles in the past? It kind of looks like a yew-handled axe. Surprised that nobody mentioned that option.

Fun fact: Ötzi the iceman had a staff and axe made of yew -- https://www.iceman.it/en/equipment/

[ChainOfFools]

Y for yellow, given that's the color of the handle and that you need something to be representative of the color. Even having a yellow square could confuse it with S for square, or having a banana can confuse it with B for banana. Similar problems exist with S for Sun, C for (a yellow) crayon etc.

Also the handle is what has been drawn superimposed over the letter.

Still, confusion with A for axe isnt any better than S for sun or whatever. Maybe the reasoning was that axe was semantically far enough away from being one of the usual standard bearers of the color yellow, that children would associate the letter with the color rather than the object?

[BLKNSLVR]

"Yellow handled axe" is the kind of answer that has seen me banned from playing Scattegories with certain people.

("Poo-Brown" as Colour starting with 'P' was the actual instigator)

[masswerk]

Personally, I can't see the answer being "yellow", as this is all about nouns and tangible objects (like things and animals).

Having said that, I enjoyed how the case was built on the faded outline, while this entire spot of the ball shows faded black print, as may be observed by the outlines of the infamous "Y".

(I'd rather opt for the "yxa" approach, probably the route taken by someone just browsing image search for quick ideas and failing to realize that this is not an English word. — Non-indo-european languages and scripts do exist.)

[frostburg]

A bucket of yellow paint would be a likely choice if that were the case.

[rjmunro]

I'm liking the yellow theory as the "axe head" looks a log like the top of a paint tube like the one in this poster: https://www.kingandmcgaw.com/prints/david-booth-malcolm-and-...

[plaidfuji]

Anybody who has bought children’s toys on Amazon before would immediately think, “oh, it’s because it’s a knockoff made in China, this is not worth further investigation”. And they would be right.

[throwaway167]

The widespread manufacture of low price goods in China had been at full steam for over a decade, closer to two, by 2005 the date of first manufacture of the ball.

And the manufacturer couldn't find the original designers' details. And laid no claim to copyright (which seems strange).

Perhaps it was the case of a knockoff of a knockoff of a knockoff. A CAD file from the 1990s bumping around commodity manufactures via QQ and USB sticks, the design adapted the next order of 10,000 items by any one of a multitude of small commodities producers. Having sourced during that time to now, I'd fully believe it.

[replwoacause]

Wow, that Dan Bron sure put in some legwork. Impressive level of investigation. Same goes for many of the other commenters. It’s pretty impressive when people ban together to use their collective talents and minds this way. Are there any groups/subreddits or other places online where people get together to do this kind of stuff?

[hyperthesis]

It's the mods who ban together locked as interesting

[remh]

r/rbi

[yuters]

This reminds me of a wood board alphabet puzzle that was gifted to my kid which was made to both work in English and French. Every letter from B to Z were easy to guess. However the letter A was the drawing of a little girl playing in a puddle...

We figured out it might stand for Anorak: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parka

[kelnos]

After reading that lengthy, well-researched answer, I felt a bit deflated when I saw another answer lower down, that seems pretty plausible given that the ball in question a knock-off created by a Chinese company:

> 鉞 is yuè in pinyin, a romanization of Chinese. This translates to ax.[0]

We'll probably never know if the origin is yxa or 鉞... or even something entirely different, sadly.

[0] https://english.stackexchange.com/a/395521

[WiSaGaN]

The character '鉞' is not commonly used in modern Chinese. I would seriously doubt that anyone teaching Chinese would use this word to illustrate the letter 'Y' in English or Pinyin, especially to toddlers. There are plenty of child-friendly words starting with 'Y' that could be used instead.

[trjordan]

Friends, please, click on the link. There's a long and interesting investigation that answers the question, which is presumably why this was posted.

[linuxftw]

My personal theory is double translation of sorts. The item in question could be a 'hatchet.' Many romance languages use 'j' for the 'h' sound in English. Somebody somewhere was looking at 'jatchet.' Next, someone assumed that the j was pronounced 'y' as in a Germanic language (and also Semitic?). Thus, they ended up with 'yatchet.'

Of course, 'y' is right next to 'h' on a qwerty keyboard, so it could just be a typo if they're going for hatchet.

[messe]

> Of course, 'y' is right next to 'h' on a qwerty keyboard, so it could just be a typo if they're going for hatchet.

I could also potentially see somebody, not entirely comfortable with reading/writing latin script, mixing them up as the glyphs aren't entirely dissimilar.

[scoot]

Past submissions:

(https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/395382/which-wor...) 615 points|Gigablah|7 years ago|158 comments

(https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/395382/which-wor...) 179 points|flexagoon|1 hour ago|53 comments

(https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/395382/which-wor...) 56 points|colinprince|4 years ago|4 comments

(https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/395382/which-wor...) 3 points|kent1|7 years ago|0 comments

(https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/395382/which-wor...) 3 points|vermilingua|7 years ago|0 comments

HN really should surface these by default.

[sriku]

I saw the "Yxa" note, but couldn't it be for "Yew" which is a tough wood used to make axe handles? It also fits the curved handle picture in this article - https://www.woodworkingtrade.com/best-wood-for-axe-handles/

[jon889]

It’s questions like these that made StackExchange worth visiting and browsing. When they decided to be super strict about being on topic it made the quality of the sites go downhill a lot. Now there is much less reason for experts to hang out on the sites and while there provide answers to new questions.

[jimhefferon]

I'll note though that it is locked. Anytime I find something super interesting in a SE forum, it has been declared off-topic.

[karlzt]

This submission reminds me of this one:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37359193

The Mystery of the Bloomfield Bridge (1028 points | 4 months ago | 270 comments)

Investigating thoroughly about something that doesn't fucking matter.

[Tao3300]

> The close votes are misguided. The question is about English. That the most likely answer is a Swedish word does not change the fact that the question is about English.

FFS. Wherever people can put their own words on someone else's website, you'll find this guy.