Hungary stamps

This began as a short writing on the boring stamps of Hungary. By chance, I came across a large number of stamps from Hungary, all issued some years ago. I sorted them by denomination as usual. There were buildings, buildings, and more buildings. This really cemented my image of Eastern European countries issuing large numbers of boring stamps, basically featuring peoples’ faces or, well, buildings.

But I found a few exceptions, such as this series of airplane stamps. Curiously, all of them are biplanes, with two sets of wings. That was about it for Hungarian stamps, so far as I knew.

On a lark, I did some googling and found that recent stamps from Hungary are much more colorful and varied in theme. A particularly interesting recent release is a stamp commemorating the 200th anniversary of the birth of Louis Braille, who developed the system by which blind people can read text by passing their fingers over raised dots. The Hungarian stamp includes writing in Braille – as does a US commemorative coin to be released this year.

日本語hints:
boring – you probably know the meaning of this word (つまらない、退屈), but be sure to separate boring vs. bored. –ed adjectives (interested, overwhelmed) describe how you or I feel, while –ing adjectives (interesting, overwhelming) describe the cause or source of the feeling (the movie was interesting; the blog was boring). For example: I read a boring blog, and so I felt bored.

cement an image: “cement” can sometimes be used as a verb, meaning to solidify or to fix permanently

biplane: 複葉機, an airplane with two sets of wings (see the stamps). Yes, there is also such thing as a triplane (三葉飛行機), though I have not found any pictured on Hungarian stamps so far. But this does bring us to the exciting topic of number-related prefixes (接頭語、接頭辞). “bi” and “di” can both be used for “two” – bicycle, bilateral discussions. “tri” can be used for “three” – tricycle, triangle. There is an old George Carlin joke involving “bi” and “try”, but we’ll leave that aside for now.

“on a lark” = on a whim, just for fun, no special reason. Online dictionaries give me いたずらで or other meanings which don’t feel quite right. I think it is used more commonly as なんとなく.

commemorate: 記念する

Braille: 点字、点字法