I've encountered the following sentence in a game:
時には後ろを振り返ると案外役に立つ事がコロッと転がってたりするもんだ。
First, I'd like to understand why the "to" in コロッと isn't in katakana like the rest of the word, why the dictionary writes it all in hiragana (http://jisho.org/search/korotto). Maybe I got the wrong word?
But regardless of that, how do I put that part of the sentence into words? I seem to have it in my mind, but can't quite say it in english.
Answer
This コロッと isn't really describing the quality of the thing itself, I mean, it is, but much more reflecting the speaker's impression or observation.
In your example, 転がっている alone can fully depict the situation, "it's lying on the ground". The remainder, コロッと and ～たりする both represent the speaker's mood.
コロッと implies (of course not round or rolling-ness here) something exists there as casually, unattendedly as a roadside pebble. In other word, it's actually a rhetoric attributing one's failure to notice to that innocent thing.
たりする is a worth learning colloquial idiom that derives from たり of probability or exemplification. It means "sometimes could happen/do", "do — or something" or "things such like — happen".
No comments:
Post a Comment