Thread by @sakaimii

The whole conversation about slang got me feeling a bit sad because I find a lot of the slang in Japanese really creative, so let me go into a few aspects of JP slang that I personally like:

New verbs are constantly being added to the lexicon. Take “tapiru”, for example.

A couple of years ago tapioca/bubble tea exploded in popularity, particularly with young people. People were going out for it so much the verb “tapiru” was coined to express the act of having or going out for bubble tea!

There’s also convenient stuff like misuru (to make a mistake), and disuru (to insult someone). I particularly like disuru because it’s literally taken from “diss” which is slang in English to begin with. It’s like inception slang.

There’s riajuu which stands for “riaru (real) juujitsu”, referring to people who are well adjusted and living their best lives with friends and significant others as opposed to those of us Twitter dwellers.

And this isn’t even touching on the sheer amount of net slang that exists. Many people already know about “kusa haeru” (lit: growing grass), which stems from “www” or the net slang way to say “lol”. The w’s lined up together look like grass, which led to the coining of the phrase

There’s a lot of outdated slang (called “shigo”—dead language) that goes back into fashion in cycles, or that have a few survivors that make it into modern use. “zagin de shisu” is a classic example.

“Zagin de shisu” is “ginza de sushi” (sushi at Ginza) with the words (except for de) flipped. It was a popular turn of phrase during the 80’s, when tougo (flipped language) was particularly in fashion. Nowadays people use it as a tongue in cheek callback to bubble era frivolity.

However! Did you know that this trend of flipped words dates all the way back to the Edo period? In fact, common words like “darashinai” (slovenly) originate from their unflipped versions (shidaranai—same meaning)!

The word “neta” (material for a story, article, joke, etc) is also a flipped version of “tane”, which means the same thing (among other things).

Slang goes deep in Japanese.

The reason why you see a lot of “meme” (I hate using this as shorthand for slang but they kinda are intrinsically linked at this point) language used for charas who are gyaru is because they’re basically the same demographic as the people who use “meme” language: teenage girls

Of course it’s not a 1 to 1 correlation, but it’s pretty darn close when it comes down to the spirit of the words. This sort of adaptation is tricky, but it’s really rewarding when it works out, particularly because Japanese is so mired in its own colorful slang.