What's the meaning of "嵌めたな。"

Question

A: I fitted it.

B: You set me up.

I thought it was A, but some video says it's B, so which one is it?

Answer 1

Japanese and English are very different in how they communicate information. A stand alone sentence in English can frequently be understood (even if only imperfectly) without any further context. Japanese is quite different. Just a simple verb alone is an entire sentence.

見たな

What does this mean? It could mean: "I saw you", "you saw me", "he saw me", "they saw us", etc. etc. In a different context perhaps: "You saw the headline". Given the right context, any of these meanings could be made obvious.

In English, this effect is harder to convey. But, consider the phrase "family jewels". What does it mean? Am I referring to someone's testicles or a grandmother's priceless diamond necklace. Without context, there's no way to know.

The Japanese verb はめる has a wide range of possible meanings (as per the Jisho link I provided in the comments). はめた is just the past tense of this verb. With はめたな, な is just a particle whose range of meaning is beyond the scope of this answer, but it adds a bit of color to the expression (English doesn't have a real equivalent to this, "isn't it?" barely scratches the possibilities).

So, what you have here is a situation like the verb 見た. Only はめる has a much broader range of possibilities of meanings from "to put on" to "ensnare" to (according to Jisho) "sexual intercourse", which for me was a revelation, but then given the right context might be easily enough construed (I'm going to guess that it is rather crude).

I'm not sure how useful the youtube video you linked to is for learning Japanese. While certainly はめたな can mean "you set me up!", how likely is this something that you're going to say in Japanese (it would be extremely confrontational if you did). Perhaps you might hear it in an anime. But more likely, you're going to use this verb to say things like, てぶくろをはめた (I put on my gloves). I can imagine a detective movie in which Sherlock quips, "はめたな" ("hmmm, she'd put on her gloves") and thus concludes that the suspicious landlord is actually innocent.

The youtube video is an odd collection of random expressions with a broad range of formality that are a bit incongruous next to each other. If you cut an pasted some together in a creative way to make a story, it could probably be quite amusing. But, if you walked into a room and just announced 最低なやつ！はめたな, folk would probably just break out into laughter (or just mutter to themselves 変な外人だな).

Anyhow, there are lots of great places to learn and study Japanese online (and on youtube even). Some are kind of hilarious. But generally these sorts of lists are just not really all that helpful as you might think they are.