Wrong Place for Forgiveness

Today I bring you two victims, both with the same mistake.


First, check out this girl's ink. She wanted to get a "Forgiveness" tattoo in Arabic. Did I say Arabic? I sure did...


As you can see, this is very much not Arabic, but Hebrew. However, this is not "Forgiveness" either. Forgiveness, in Hebrew, is Slicha. There is also a multiple form (forgivenesses?) Slichot.

This particular Hebrew tattoo says neither. It says Slichoch which isn't a real word and just sounds funny.


Okay, now for the second victim:


This tattoo is not only misspelled - says the meaningless non-word Slichch, but it's real ugly too.


Why did these mistakes happen? It's the similarity of several Hebrew letters, which can confuse the hell out of novice Hebrew scholars:



So how do you write "Forgiveness" in Hebrew? Like this:


By the way, it also means sorry, which I bet these people really are.

Intergalactic Brotherhood Doodle

Today I bring you this fine specimen of a Hebrew tattoo, a token of brotherly affection that is supposed to read "Eternal Brother"... but does not.


In fact, it's hardly readable at all. Unless you know what you're looking at, you'll probably never realize it's Hebrew. In this case - a definite advantage for the victim.

Anyway, when deciphered, it actually comes to say "Olam Ach" in Hebrew, which translates to "Brother World" (you know, like Twin Towns... but galactically).

The mixup stems from two factors - Olam, which means world, can also mean eternal - but only in suitable context. Also, there's absolutely no elegant way to say "Eternal Brother" in Hebrew without sounding dumb. Just one of those language things.

The closest decent sounding variation I could think up was "Brothers Forever" - "Achim Lanezzach":

Unidentified Hebrew Tattoo

Today I have a challenge for you Hebrew savvy people, an unidentified Hebrew tattoo:


Seriously, what was this guy going for?

If you apply some liberal spacing, this disaster of a Hebrew tattoo could come to read something along the lines of "Mined the god". On the other hand, there's a big English tattoo just below the Hebrew one, reading "Israel", so maybe that's what he meant...

In any case - As is, that Hebrew tattoo doesn't mean anything, it's pure gibberish. I would like to know what it was supposed to be, though. Ideas?

Something from Alien

Some bad Hebrew tattoos are just too funny. Take this one, for example. This victim wanted a tattoo of her kid's name "Noah James", and so she got this:


I'm sorry to report that this hardly says "Noah James". Roughly translated, it actually reads "Hatch with Comfort" in Hebrew. This new meaning is totally coincidental, and creepily reminds me of Alien.


So what went wrong here?

The first name, Noah, is actually correct, assuming that you accept its Hebrew pronunciation - NO-akh. However, it was placed as the second word. Remember, Hebrew is written right-to-left, the first word should be on the right.

The second name, James, is simply bogus. Whoever composed this, probably had no clue how to write James in Hebrew. Solution? Take a different name - Jacob, and flip it backwards. Voila!


So, this is how you write "Noah James" in Hebrew. I've written two versions - the top features the Hebrew pronunciation of Noah (NO-akh), on the bottom is the English one (NO-ah).