Wasei Eigo

English professor Anne Curzan talks about what exactly makes a word "real" in her TED Talk of a similar title. Curzan talks about how dictionaries can't keep up with a lot of the new words that we've integrated into our vocabulary and how the definitions of some words have changed completely. She noted how a word like "nice" really meant something closer to "silly" and how "awful" used to denote that something was "worthy of awe". She even stated that she has her students bring in two current slang words into the first week of class so she can learn newer words and their meanings. So what makes a word "real"? Curzan said not that the word is located in the dictionary, but that,

"[i]f a community of speakers is using a words and knows what it means, it's real."

I agree with this statement; we use "Google" as a verb, even though it was (traditionally) a proper noun, and know exactly what it means if used and conjugated in a sentence. We've come to know that "hangry" is a word with the general definition that it is 'someone who is angry because they are hungry'. Words like "terrific" have changed drastically in meaning; reading the word in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, I came to understand the word mean something that was "causing terror", however now, it comes to mean something "extraordinarily great". This doesn't just happen in English, and even slang can change meaning over time. This happens in other languages as well. To demonstrate we are going to examine the Japanese word 「ホモ達」.

In Japanese, the word for friend is 「友達」(tomo dachi) and the (common abbreviation) for a homosexual is 「ホモ」(literally just "homo"). Smash the two together, and you get 「ホモ達」(homo dachi) or the term for your "gay friend". 

According to Japanese dictionary "Denshi Jisho", the term is slang, therefore not really a "word" per se. I believe that it is a word, however, based on Curzan's statement. "Homodachi" is one of many words that came out of Japanese language phenomenon know as "Wasei Eigo".

"Most lunguists classify wasei eigo vocabulary as 'pseudo-loanwords' or 'pseudo-English'...[it] refers to words quite literally manufacture in Japan [acheived] by splicing together never-before-seen combinations of English words."

It's a weird concept, but most English speakers wouldn't recognize what these words meant, or sometimes what words were used to create this word until it is explained to them. Take the word 「インキー」(inkii); it means to be locked out of your car because you locked your keys in your car accident. Break it down and you realize 「インキー」is just a phonetic translation of the English phrase "in key", as in you left your keys inside your car (hence "in-key" or "inkii" in romanji). Cool right?

Wasei Eigo is literally taking words from other languages, tearing them up, and recombining them for their own purposes. Kinda like how English got its grammar amiright? Wasei Eigo is a beautiful demonstration of the creativity in language and how we can build and add new words into our lexicon. Some Wasei Eigo combines foreign words and existing Japanese words to create a word or phrase that means something new, like 「バタ臭い」(batakusai) literally meaning "butter stink". It sounds like jibberish right? If you had to take a stab at it, what do you think it means? Well, it's an adj. used to describe anything that reeks of Western or Westernized styles (enforcing the stereotype to them that we apparently use a lot of butter over here and they do not in Asia).

Wasei Eigo is a lot of fun, and if you look at the link above, you'll get to read through more amazing instances of this in the Japanese language! While they might not appear in a traditional or standard dictionary, "inkii", "homodachi", and "batakusai" are all valid words in the Japanese lexicon. If you say them to someone, they'll know exactly what that word means, making Wasei Eigo, by Curzan's statement, "real" words. Words, especially rooted in slang (and in this case, Wasei Eigo) challenge prescriptive grammar rules of languages and show off more of the creative side of language.

~Maryちゃん