Clearly, We Have Different Definitions of "Playschool"

I am one of those people who tends to accumulate more reading material than I have adequate leisure time for. Eight out of twelve months of the year, I live within walking distance of a very reasonably-priced used books store that will happily purchase all the dreck I have accumulated over the year, the proceeds from which I will use to obtain new dreck at 4 bucks an 800-page hardcover. The other four months are spent within a $1 bus ride away from two other stores in the same local chain, the cost of which is at least four times the amount I can expect to pay for the cheapest paperback. This alone is enough to make me a regular customer, but when you throw in the fact that they also tend to have difficult-to-find video games and 10-cent CD's in little bins, well, you can expect me to be perusing the place at least once every other day.

Goodness knows I try to be egalitarian with all those 50-cent pulps, but inevitably, my mind will turn to the most interesting-looking tomes first. So it happens that I end up with a pile of books that I've owned for ages, but have yet to crack into the spines of. Luckily, sometimes the well of interest will dry, and I will delve into my emergency rations. This happened recently, and I found myself packing Pendragon: The Merchant of Death, by D.J. MacHale, into the "book pocket" of my backpack. The series is one I often see in the children's section of book stores, and the cover of something like the eight novel in the series piqued my interested. Of course, you can't start in the middle, so I dug up a copy of the first book and had proceeded to chivalrously ignore it in favor of a re-read of the fantastic (by my tastes, anyway) Fablehaven by Brandon Mull. Of course, no book will let you ignore it forever, especially if you leave it in plain sight. I sat there in my desk, waiting for my Spanish professor to arrive, scanning over the pages.

When the following gem of a paragraph, found on page 68 of the Aladdin Fantasy paperback edition, leapt out and caught my eyes. Spontaneous giggles erupted and made the red-haired kid near the blackboard look at me funny.

Mark tossed his bunch of socks out one window and quickly threw open a window. Courtney surveyed the room, stopping in front of two posters on the wall. One was a colorful Hentai-animation superhero cartoon, the other was a gorgeous girl lying on the beach in a leopard-print thong.

Courtney said, "Looks like you've got kind of a conflicted puberty versus playschool thing going on."

...Which is fine, if your version of playschool happens to involve girls in tight bikinis.

Allow me to explain.

Clearly, the author is trying to appeal to the hip anime subculture here. "Hentai" is clearly a Japanese word, with legitimate meaning in the realm of the genre, and Japanese cartoons (anime) and their general style have become very popular in the West as of late. It's gotten to the to the point where American- and Canadian-made cartoons are starting to try and emulate that particular drawing style. (Irony springs eternal here, as the "anime style" as we now know it began as an attempt to replicate the facial features of Walt Disney characters, but that's not the point.) In Japan, there are anime targeted at all audiences--from small children to adults--but here in North America, cartoons are still largely considered to be for children. Hence why might label Mark's cartoon poster "playschool."

Notice how I mentioned that "hentai" has actual connotations within anime? Well, as evidence that the author clearly did not study for his vocabulary test, the actual meaning of the word is completely at odds with Courtney's statement--and with what I think Mark's parents would want him to have displayed in his room.

Hentai, my friends, is anime pornography.
(Warning: So very not work safe. Don't look at me, look at the people who edit Wiki pages.)

To be fair to the author, the word hentai is extremely similar to the anime term sentai, whose meaning is probably much closer to what the author intended. It means, roughly, "task force," but is often used in the anime subculture to refer to superheroes or superhero-related anime. (This association stems from the Super Sentai, a series of corny Japanese superhero TV shows that frequently get repackaged for the US as the corny Power Rangers.) However, the original sentai in Japan are live-action, not cartoons, which still displays some confusion on the author's part.

Even as I pondered this, I still felt like banging my head into my desk. This is such an impossibly easy error to correct. I don't know who would even know of the existence of the word "hentai" without being an anime enthusiast (which probably explains how this one slipped through editing), and I don't know how said enthusiast could know the word without knowing what it means. The only thing I can imagine is the author rifling through a random list of anime terms (quite possibly on Wikipedia), spotting one, saying, "Hey! This is cool!" and plugging it into his story without bothering to look it up. But this violates not only proper loan word etiquette, but the rules of good writing--heck, the rules of language in general: Do not use a word if you do not know what it means. Do you hear that? It's the sound of Grice's Maxims screaming out in pain! O Logic! O Quality! How the system has failed you!

A simple Google search could have rectified this problem. I don't want to know what turns up if one Googles "hentai," but I'm betting it could have cleared up any uncertainties about this word reeeeally quick. I realize that even the best authors can't meticulously research every minor detail they put into their novels, but is it so much to ask that pornography doesn't end up inside our children's books?

Let us not consider the possibility that this "misuse" was intentional. I don't generally enjoy speaking ill of people, especially those I don't actually know, but if this was the case, I'd be far too squicked out to read further.