Blog #9: Slang

Hey everyone, it’s Makiko. Sorry for the late post.

Summary of the lecture

Language is a living thing so that it is changing all the time. Slang, an informal language used by people in a particular group, is one form created through the changing. People use slang to share the emotions in an easy, funny and creative way. And people also use it to feel the sense of belonging to the group and identify themselves. 

 

Japanese Slangs

I’d like to give you 3 examples of Japanese slangs, ファボる, 女子会 and ぼっち飯.

ファボる

This is a term for Twitter. There is a system called “favorite” in Twitter. If you find your favorite tweet and want to see it even after it has lost in the long fast timeline, you can keep it in the box of “favorite” so that you can find the tweet easily from the “favorite” whenever you want to see it. ファボる(Fav-る) means to make a tweet “favorite.”

女子会 (Joshi-kai)

It is a women-only lunch/dinner/drink. In Joshi-kai, girls don’t have to care about guys and talk about everything that they actually feel and get free from stresses. Most Joshi-kais are held in some pretty fashionable restaurants or bars, not just normal Izakaya (居酒屋), to enjoy the woman-fullness! (<--- I've just made this word "woman-fullness! Could it be a slang?? Haha)

ぼっち飯（botchi-meshi）

It means having meal alone. This is a negative expression for those people who have meal alone and it implies that they are doing so because they don’t have any friends to have together.
It surely seems like having lunch alone is just a normal thing and it doesn’t worth to make special slang for it. But this slang has made. Why? I think because recent young Japanese people cannot act alone so that just “having meal alone” has become a special thing that worth to make a word for it.


My opinion of slang

I think there are two big reasons why people use slangs.

1.    There’s no particular word for it.
If you have to explain the situation without the slang, it’ll take a long time (just like I did upward.) ファボる is a very good example for this reason. Twitter is a new culture and there’s no particular word for it so we had to create it.
Slangs are made to fit the new culture or lifestyle.

2.    To identify ourselves.
This is also mentioned in the lecture, and I strongly think so, too. People want to feel the sense of belonging to the group (and sometimes to feel that they are different from others) and feel relieved that they are not alone. ぼっち飯 is a good example.

 

Too much use of slang sounds foolish so I don’t like it. But it is true that slang is very useful in many ways. I think people (especially, young people like us) should care about when and for whom to use.