Tsunami

That's what the kanji (Japanese adaptation of Chinese characters) look like for "tsunami", if you've ever wondered. Literally a "harbor wave", rather than the popular "tidal wave" (which would be a wave caused by the tidal activity of the moon, rather than an earthquake), it seems to have entered the English language as a word in its own right at some point, and to have obtained critical mass by virtue of the tsunami which struck South and Southeast Asia, the Arabian Peninsula, East Africa, and Indian Ocean islands a year ago today.

Enough linguistics, though--although I find them enjoyable, that's not what's important right now. What's important is that today is the one-year anniversary of the devastating tsunami, and people still need a lot of help. I'll blog about that in a separate post, coming right up.

(UPDATE: replaced kanji with JPG and retitled, after learning the kanji weren't universally viewable, 1-15-06)