Monday, 1 June 2015

pronunciation - How do you pronounce "☓☓" as a placeholder?


I have come across the following in a piece of fiction (「永遠のジャック&ベティ」, by 清水{しみず}義範{よしのり}):



「今日は上着を着ているためには暑すぎます」



◯◯するには☓☓すぎる。つまり、暑くて上着なんか着ていられない、という意味だった。



As you can see, the bolded sentence is presented as an example of a Japanese sentence structure, with the ◯◯ and ☓☓ standing in for two arbitrary 動詞 (or 形容詞 or 形容動詞, I guess). It is part of the running prose (i.e. not dialogue), so no character in the story actually speaks it.


How do you read this aloud, though? My first instinct is to read it as 「マルマルするにはバツバツすぎる」, but this seems kind of weird to me. I've seen マル used a lot as a placeholder, but バツ seems to carry with it a meaning of "wrong" or "incorrect" and doesn't seem like a neutral placeholder.


EDIT: My professor claims that it is incorrect to read both the ◯◯ and the ☓☓ above identically (as なになに), because then you lose the fact that the ◯◯ and ☓☓ can (and perhaps should) be distinct lexical items. In light of this, I have provisonally unaccepted @tdes's answer and am now hoping for answers with some sort of authoritative citation.




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