When Apple Inc. unveiled Siri on its new iPhone 4S on Tuesday, in most parts of the world the personal virtual assistant app was taken as a serious plus in an otherwise disappointing upgraded handset.
In Japan, though, many found it tough to take Siri seriously at all.
That’s because the name Siri sounds suspiciously close to the Japanese word shiri – a colloquial term for buttocks that, appropriately enough, rhymes with “crass.”
The Japanese Twittersphere immediately took to calling the voice control app the three-letter word for derriere with some abandon. The kanji character 尻 soon cropped up below Siri as a trending topic on Twitter here. In the early hours after the announcement, one local Twitter wag user pointed out that when typing “Siri” into Google, the search engine asked “Did you mean: 尻?”
Full story: Seriously, Apple? In Japan, Siri Fans Bottom Jokes