Vorpal Sword - Sharp Enough to Behead Enemies

A few days ago, during my live stream, I obtained a two-hand sword named Vorpal Sword in the Steam version of Romancing SaGa 2, a remake of JRPG. My first meeting with the weapon was about 25 years ago when I was playing its Super Famicom version. Until this day, however, I'd never wondered what the adjective "vorpal" means. So, for the first time in my SaGa history, I looked up the word in dictionaries.

Unfortunately, none of them gave me an answer. Then one of my viewers told me that the first appearance of the word was in a novel called Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll. 

He took his vorpal sword in hand,

longtime the manxsome foe he sought

So rested he by the Tum-Tum Tree

And stood awhile in thought.

One, two! One, two! And through and through

The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!

He left it dead, and with its head

He went galumphing back.

The viewer also said the sword appears in Dungeons and Dragons as a weapon with a chance to decapitate an enemy.

Actually, Vorpal Sword in Romancing SaGa 2 has a unique sword technique which always critically hits against humans and sometimes kill them instantly.

I guess Akitoshi Kawazu, the producer of the SaGa series, got inspiration for the weapon from D&D. It is well-known among SaGa fans that he would import American board games and play them with his friends in his formative years.

Later, I learned that there were swords with the same name in some Final Fantasy games. I also found out that the swords are called シャープソード (Sharp Sword) in their Japanese version. What a shitty generic name!

Vopal Sword | Final Fantasy Wiki 

Vorpal Sword | Final Fantasy Encyclopeia

Royal Milk Tea

Do you know royal milk tea? It's a type of milk tea popular in Japan. You first infuse 3 teaspoonful of tea leaves with a cup of hot water in a milk pan, second add a cup of milk to the infusion, and finally heat them together until they nearly boil. I always use Earl Grey for milk tea but the choice of tea leaves depends on your taste. Because the ratio for milk is relatively higher than typical milk tea, it has a rich creamy taste, and that's why I love the tea. 

I always thought the cooking method had been invented by somebody working in the kitchen of Buckingham Palace. Because why else would the name include the word "royal"? And I knew British people loved tea.

But I was totally wrong. I found out yesterday that the name was coined by Lipton, a Japanese tea company when they released a product called Royal Milk Tea under their brand of "Royal" in 1960s. Later the term became a synonym of milk tea made with the method mentioned above. I have no clue why they used the adjective for their brand name, but at least, now I've learned royal milk tea is a Japanese-English term and it has nothing to do with the British royal family.