#pu5

Names are not just sounds; they have etymologies. If you read MHA trivia, you might be hyperaware of this, since most of the character’s names are carefully constructed puns. Horikoshi constructs names with awareness of some trait of theirs. The people who actually gave characters their names in the story - presumably their parents, most of the time - would not have this awareness beforehand. Aliases, however, are crafted with previous knowledge of the person’s traits, especially aliases given to oneself. 

Now, Dabi. I knew it was translated as “cremation”, but as a non-native speaker, the one in MHA was the only instance I’d seen of the word.

Turns out, the usual word for “cremation” is 火葬, kasou, whereas dabi is 荼毘. And although the characters used are different, they both translate to “cremation”. 

Now, though, what’s the difference? 

火葬 (kasou) and 荼毘 (dabi) both have to do with Buddhist cremation rituals, but the reason 荼毘 is more infrequently used is that it’ss adapted from a term in Pāli, the language of Theravāda Buddhism. The kanji in 火葬 mean “burial by fire”, which is pretty straightforward for a word meaning cremation. The kanji in 荼毘 are “weed” and “assistance”; however, as is the generally the case with foreign terms put into Chinese (and thus, kanji), the characters are used moreso phonetically than they are for the meaning. The original Pali term is jhāpita, “was burnt, was set fire to”, the passive participle of jhāpeti. Jhāpita was translated into Chinese Buddhism as 闍鼻多 (phonetically, jabita in Japanese); then abbreviated into 闍鼻 (ph. jabi), then probably morphed into 荼毘 (dabi - both an abbreviation and perhaps a simplification of sounds and characters, in which both characters are still used phonetically). 

I translated the expression mentioned by Midoriya, 荼毘に付す (dabi ni fusu), as “entrust to the flames”. Most of the time, it simply seems to be an euphemism for 火葬 (which, remember, contains the term “burial”), so instead of saying you’re gonna bury someone you’re putting them in better hands (which I guess flames are). The rest of the time, however, it seems that people are simply unaware of the religious origins of 荼毘, so while it the expression would still be “entrust (a body) to the flames”, it only means this part, without the additional connotations of night vigil and funeral service rituals that 火葬 carries. In other words - 荼毘  is stripped bare of the humanity of cremation, and makes it sound not much different from plain incineration.