There is a proverb in Turkish that means “One madman (ein Chinese) threw a stone into a well, forty wise men couldn't get it out.” This discussion is a bit like that.
Turkish proverb: "Bir deli bir kuyuya taş atmış, kırk akıllı çıkaramamış."
I married a southern gal, eastern North Carolina to be exact. As a Minnesotan, I have become familiar with the following:
1. "[he/she/they] are doing the lord's work" roughly translates to, "that task is so terrible/annoying, but someone has to do it, so props to them for doing it without complaining."
2. "bless their heart" roughly translates to, "they are really trying, but wow, so much fail"
As someone from NC with a LOT of family from eastern NC specifically, I'd like to provide an addendum to "bless your heart".
I see it frequently cited as always meant sarcastically/disingenuosly. It certainly can mean "screw you", "go away", or "... so much fail".
However, if there's one thing people should understand about southern/NC etiquette, it's that passive aggression is the primary form of aggression. There are plenty of southerners who would never tell you to GFY straight to your face. That doesn't mean they aren't thinking that and trying to say that, though. Perhaps even with a "bless your heart".
Given all of that, "bless your[/their] heart" is absolutely to be taken at face value about as often as it shouldn't. That level of plausible deniability provides the highest level of potential passive-aggressiveness.
I can't speak for absolutely everybody, but at least if someone from eastern NC says "bless your heart", they could mean anything between "GFY" and "I'm so sorry that happened, please come to my house so that I can shower you with hospitality". You might never know which they meant, and that's intentional.
I also take it to mean that it's either work others are often unwilling to do, or something that's really difficult, or something that I've been wanting for a long time but haven't gotten anyone to help me with.
For example: There's a fluorescent light above my desk that flickers and has been driving me crazy for years. I can't get facilities to fix it because they need a ticket that's approved by management and has an approved budget, and all their other tasks are more urgent.... so it slowly drives me mad for a year. Finally, a facilities person says "You know what... I'm not supposed to do this without management approval... but I'll just fix this real quick and it'll be our secret" ..... Me: "Oh, thank you, you're doing God's work"
I suspect the saying may be more common in North America. I’ve never heard anyone say it in Ireland – though American phrases and spelling are starting to become more popular thanks to the Internet and the success of American tech companies.
Maybe I'm also misunderstanding you, but if that comment was aimed about me then I wasn't remotely offended by somebody mentioning god, I just didn't understand if they were literally talking about the God they believe in or if it was a joke/idiom/whatever
I’m confused to how you made the assumption that the designer would be searching for “axe” in Chinese. That still assumes axe but then they decided to color it yellow afterwards?
My first thought was bopomofo ㄚ (which corresponds pleasingly to pinyin "a") but that's just a normally-oriented Y! And it sits on the other side of the keyboard anyway
> I have no idea what's that "upside down Y-shaped character" is about
The sibling post's "bopomofo" seems far more plausible, but if you're talking European alphabets, the Greek letter Lambda (for the L sound, AIUI) looks pretty much like an upside-down (lower-case) 'y'. Maybe one working hypothesis at the time was that the person set to find pics for the Chines pirate manufacturer looked at it the wrong way around, read it as a Lambda / L, and looked for pictures to illustrate that. Idunno, WAG.
Later, there's a comment pointing out a transliteration of battle axe into english yields a word that starts with y.
Combining that:
> 鉞 is yuè in pinyin, a romanization of Chinese.
and another comment shows that using Chinese to search for Axe on Google Images returns the original clip art:
> Me getting into the shoes of the designer: Assumptions: 1. The designer is in a hurry. 2. They would search in their language which I found via google translate is 斧头
However, 斧头 doesn't yield anything that starts with Y, and Google image search doesn't really seem to understand that that 鉞 (yuè) means axe. Duck Duck Go image search returns pictures of axes for 鉞, but doesn't show the original clip art in the top of its search results.
At any rate, it's unlikely the designer was using either of those search engines. Perhaps some Chinese search engine displays the "translation" of 鉞 to yué, and also provides the correct clipart.
I started reading the accepted answer on Stack Exchange, found it unconvincing and went to Wikipedia to look at the entry for axe. There I found that Yue is a type of Chinese battle axe.
The ball is probably Chinese-made. So I believe the answer that talks about Yué as the Chinese word for battle axe is the right one.
Wikipedia has an image of this rather odd-looking, but beautiful Shang dynasty Yue.
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.
