You ran towards me, arms flailing, shouting at me in angry Japanese. Although I didn’t particularly agree with your rant, I was forced to continue listening to it as I put on my helmet, got my bike out of its spot, and waited for the engine to warm up enough that I could take off. And then I left you, Mr. Ranter, with my six-letter, two-word response to your ramblings: “Bite me.”
On my way home, I realized that this was probably quite rude of me. If you’re like most Japanese people I’ve met, your knowledge of colloquial English is nothing to write home about, but here I was assuming that you understood what I meant. So, in the interest of promoting a cross-cultural exchange of ideas and information, I decided to write this post explaining what the English expression “bite me” actually means. Essentially, the meaning is as follows:
Ah, I can assume that you are my neighbour in the motorcycle parking area at the hardware store. Nice to meet you. Now, as you can see, this motorcycle parking area is like most in Tokyo; it’s just a big square painted in the corner of a parking lot with a “motorcycles” sign on it. Riders are left to their own devices to park in a reasonable manner.
Now, my bike has a manual-shift gearbox; your first clue should have been the presence of a gear-change pedal down by the left footrest and the accompanying clutch-release lever on the handlebars. What this means, dear neighbour, is that at bare minimum, I have to be able to get into the left side of my bike enough to be able to shift into Neutral and push it out of my space.
By your angry shouting and frantic arm-waving, I can see that you are upset. But fear not, dear neighbour! I am not trying to steal your bike! Yes, it is true that my bike is just a dinky little 50cc moped, but so is yours.. And yours is 10 years old, rusted out, with an auto-shift transmission, and held together with marijuana-themed bumper stickers. I think I’ll stay with my brand-new one, thank you very much.
No, I am not stealing your bike, I only plan to swing the back end out a few inches so I can wedge myself in to put my bike in neutral. However, if it is really important to you that nobody even touch your beautiful rusted-out Jog, perhaps you might consider leaving more than 2 inches between your bike and the one next door.
See, as you can see, “bite me” is a very useful English phrase. Use it wisely!
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