Reversal of meanings

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From Cecilia Segawa Seigle (9/18/15):

Yesterday morning's Asahi Shinbun reports that some Japanese words (or argot in certain cases) seem to be changing (reversing) meanings.

For example "yabai" (やばい), originally an argot used by criminals (thieves) meaning "not good" or "not propitious," seems to have changed its meaning among teenagers. 90% of the teens use the word "yabai" to express "wonderful," "good," "delicious," "smart-looking."  Only 5% of the people above 70 years of age used "yabai" for positive meaning; in other words the older people still use the word for negative situations.

For the word "Omomuroni" (おもむろに), an adverb meaning "unhurriedly," "slowly," 44.5% answered with the traditional meaning "slowly." 40.8% answered that "omomuroni" meant "suddenly."

This is only a small part of the phenomena revealing the breakdown of the Japanese language according to the recent survey made by Bunkacho (文化庁), Japanese government's Agency for Cultural Affairs.

From Ross Bender:

Here's a slightly more complete version — you can zoom in on the chart — then click on the various words. I tried "uzai" うざい, an unfamiliar word, then went to Google Japan for the definition.

Nathan Hopson comments:

That is one article on the subject, though it doesn't talk about omomuroni, so I assume it's not the exact same one cited.  Fortunately, the Japanese edition of Huffington Post is among the many places on the internet where this article has
been reposted:

I think a qualification is in order, though. やばい (yabai) has added the meaning of amazing or wonderful, but has not lost the meaning of awful, horrible. To suggest otherwise is entirely disingenuous and sensationalist. The article fails to distinguish between the accrual of additional meaning and the loss of original meaning, which is irresponsible.

Jiji Press reported the same in English here, with a video in Japanese.
The Agency for Cultural Affairs has an executive summary of the survey results here.

From an American who was fairly fluent in Japanese 25-30 years ago:

Quite frankly, I have an extremely difficult time understanding contemporary Japanese, either on TV or in person. For the most part, my Japanese acquaintances are my age or older, and often specialists in medieval Japanese history. They inform me that they can't understand the lingo or argot either. Whether this is a "breakdown" in the language, or merely normal change, perhaps faster in Japan than elsewhere, is not clear to me. I imagine linguists are trying to measure this.

Follow up:

"Admiration replacing risky as ‘yabai’ gains new currency " (9/18/15)



24 Comments

  1. Gene Anderson said,

    September 27, 2015 @ 7:44 am

    Well, just think of English "bad." Came to mean "good" by slow and devious means, but when meaning "good" it's usually pronounced with a longer a, more like 'baaad."

  2. J.W. Brewer said,

    September 27, 2015 @ 8:15 am

    See also sense 7 of https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ill. (Frankly I think of this as an '80's usage that I would have vaguely expected to now be hopelessly out-of-date as commonly happens with teenage slang, but perhaps not.)

  3. Charles Antaki said,

    September 27, 2015 @ 8:27 am

    The familiar response to this kind of of thing is worth making – the 'meaning' of the word ('bad' and so on) is given by the context and the features of its delivery in real time; I doubt that anyone hearing a teenager (or anyone else) exclaim 'that's WICKED!" on hearing cool news would be in much doubts as to what they meant.

  4. James said,

    September 27, 2015 @ 8:27 am

    When a pitcher has a really great pitch, announcers say it was a "nasty slider" (or fastball, etc.). It's easy to see how this can happen.

    Isn't it?

  5. Mark Mandel said,

    September 27, 2015 @ 9:49 am

    @J.W. Brewer: Ah HA! Thank you, thank you.

    It's not out of date everywhere. I have lived in Philadelphia for thirteen years, and till now I have never gotten the point of all the T-shirts, stickers, etc. saying "Phillies", "Illadelphia", and so on.

  6. tony in san diego said,

    September 27, 2015 @ 9:51 am

    There is another reversal that has occurred in the last 30/40 years: the term Ugly American. In the novel, the titular character was physically ugly, but culturally sensitive. However, it has come to be used in the opposite sense and its origin appears to be lost.

  7. AP said,

    September 27, 2015 @ 9:52 am

    Anecdotally (20-something proficient non-native speaker here), Japanese people my age still use the negative meaning of "yabai" much more often than the positive meaning. The positive meaning feels slangier, while the negative meaning feels more like a normal (if casual) word.

    I asked a 60-something Japanese friend about this once, and she said that what bothered her was not that "yabai" had acquired a positive meaning, but that younger people tend to use the *negative* meaning very lightly compared to the older generation, for whom the word is reserved for more strongly negative or even offensive situations.

  8. Chappers said,

    September 27, 2015 @ 10:09 am

    "Marge, when kids these days say bad, they mean good […]"

    James: something may be lost in the translation from baseball, but my impression from cricket is that commentators describe a delivery as "nasty" when it's difficult for the batsman to play it, especially if it's particularly hostilely aimed at the batsman's body or head. So "nasty" means "nasty for the batsman".

    On the other hand, "a horrible ball" is just a really poor delivery. Similarly "a horrible shot".

  9. Zeppelin said,

    September 27, 2015 @ 11:02 am

    Well, in American English you can call someone a "badass" in praise, but "awful ass" is an insult, and people will buy wallets that say "bad motherfucker" on them…plus the "bad"/"ill"/"wicked" thing mentioned above.
    Is this as common in British slang? I can't think of a clear example from German…I guess there's "krass" ("crass, drastic") for "awesome".

  10. bianca steele said,

    September 27, 2015 @ 11:32 am

    My daughter came home one day from first grade, upset that when she was using a black crayon on a class project, two boys kept telling her black is the "baddest" color. I still have no idea.

  11. James said,

    September 27, 2015 @ 11:44 am

    Chappers: yes, the same (although not particularly associated with trying to hit the batter). So maybe it isn't really a reversal.

  12. JS said,

    September 27, 2015 @ 11:56 am

    + sick

  13. JS said,

    September 27, 2015 @ 12:09 pm

    There are a number of well-known such cases in Chinese… most of which I've forgotten :(
    One is guai1 乖 'awkward, uncooperative, discordant' > the opposite (of children's behavior)

  14. Bloix said,

    September 27, 2015 @ 1:32 pm

    Bad, ill, mean, sick, bold, ridiculous, outrageous, unbelievable, shocking, stunning, transgressive.

  15. Doug said,

    September 27, 2015 @ 3:17 pm

    It seems to me that "bias(ed) towards" has been reversing its meaning.

    Suppose Norway & Sweden are playing each other in the World Cup. If someone says "The referees are biased towards Norway," my first inclination is that they're have a bias in favor of Norway (and therefore have a bias against Sweden). But I've see the opposite usage, where "bias(ed) towards X" means the same as "bias against X."

  16. krogerfoot said,

    September 27, 2015 @ 5:07 pm

    Nathan Hobson's right about the articles suggesting that something worrisome or even out of the ordinary is going on in Japanese usage shifts.

    It never even occurred to me that these shifts are all that remarkable. Non-native speakers catch on pretty quickly that words like 微妙 bimyō and やばい yabai have usages that are quite different from their dictionary definitions. I took my dictionary's word for it that bimyō meant "subtle," but in trying to use it to praise a musician's delicate touch, I quickly realized it was being understood to mean "neither here nor there, vague, meh." (I figured if I could handle "tasteless" in English to mean "bland" in some contexts but "outrageous" in others, I could handle similar flexibility in Japanese.)

    Yabai also doesn't seem that much of a head-scratcher. I can't belive younger Japanese really aren't aware of the negative meaning, since they tend to use it in situations where some irony is understood. This delicious cupcake is yabai (because I might eat six of them); this music is yabai (because it makes me wanna dance my pants off).

  17. krogerfoot said,

    September 27, 2015 @ 5:09 pm

    (Sorry for misspelling Nathan Hopson's name.)

  18. Usually Dainichi said,

    September 27, 2015 @ 9:19 pm

    + 適当

  19. Matt said,

    September 28, 2015 @ 7:22 am

    tony in san diego: semantic confusion with the Quiet American, perhaps?

    The Japanese government runs this survey every year, and every year the media make complete arses of themselves by interpreting it as documentation of the decline and fall of the language itself. How will the generations communicate without a shared thieves' argot?!

    This doesn't even really qualify as "language change" in any meaningful sense — it's just the completely normal churn of slang and the dying throes of words that have fallen out of common (spoken) use, like "omomuro ni".

  20. Usually Dainichi said,

    September 28, 2015 @ 9:36 am

    It's always interesting to see how the questions are asked. In the survey summary from the Agency for Cultural Affairs, I scroll down to おもむろに. It seems the question was asked as どちらの意味だと思うか (which one do you think is the meaning), with the 5 options essentially being one, the other, both, neither and don't know.

    There's obviously problems with this way of asking. If I think "hm…. beats me, but it kinda sounds like 'slowly'", should I reply that it means slowly, or that I don't know?

    @Matt:
    dying throes of words that have fallen out of common (spoken) use, like "omomuro ni"

    That would make sense if for young people, the two meanings were around 50-50. But for people in the 20's, it's actually 70.1% who think it's "suddenly" vs 17.2 for the original meaning. There's more than obsoleteness at play here.

    @krogerfoot:
    I can't belive younger Japanese really aren't aware of the negative meaning

    I think you're right, but let's see in 10 years. When I first started noticing the positive usage, it was always accompanied by some contextual clue. Now, for many younger speakers, I think the positive meaning has become the default. No tongue-in-cheek or wink-wink needed. I my personal ideolect, I resolve ambiguities towards the negative meaning, but when the speaker is young, I'm usually wrong.

    ——

    I didn't have time to add an explanation to 適当 (tekito:) earlier. The dictionary says adequate/appropriate, but in spoken usage, it much more often means something along the lines of "random", "sloppy" or "(someone who does) whatever comes to mind". Another one is いい加減 (i:kagen), which despite its literal meaning "right adjustment" means "irresponsible" or "halfhearted" in its lexicalized form.

  21. maidhc said,

    September 28, 2015 @ 5:36 pm

    tony in san diego, Matt: Both "The Ugly American" and "The Quiet American" have been said to be portraits of Edwin Lansdale, a very senior US intelligence officer who was one of the major architects of the Vietnam War, among other things.

    The character Colonel Hillandale in "The Ugly American" appears to be a portrait of Lansdale, not the title character. In 1959 Newsweek published an article claiming that the title character was based on a person by the name of Otto Hunerwadel, who worked for the International Cooperation Agency in Burma.

    I'm not so sure that modern usage of "ugly American" is that far off. The point is that Atkins looks ugly but helps people, while the diplomats look attractive but act in an ugly (culturally insensitive) way. It's the second meaning that usage has picked up.

  22. Matt said,

    September 28, 2015 @ 7:00 pm

    dainichi: Basically I think it is a kind of "punctuated equilibrium", where once the word falls so far out of use that the stimulus is too impoverished for people to learn it from other speakers, you have a shift involving people inferring what it "should" mean from other cues (phonemic, etc.) which can turn into a feedback loop and drive surprisingly quick and dramatic change.

  23. Steve Rapaport said,

    September 29, 2015 @ 5:04 am

    Isn't language change, normally slow and stately, subject to occasional rather sudden changes over a couple of generations?

    For example, the shift from Old English to Middle English seems to have happened over just a couple of generations (about 1150-1210?) and according to The Cambridge History of the English Language, the changeover from one writer of the Peterborough Chronicle to the next looked as if the two generations would have had a lot of trouble communicating.

  24. Elessorn said,

    September 29, 2015 @ 9:27 am

    It also occurs to me that there's a subtle but important distinction between meaning and usage being elided here.

    Think of the difference between "cool" and "bad" in their positive inflections. The praising usage of "cool" has been thoroughly naturalized to the word, as we can see from its conservation through all sorts of grammatical or phrasal changes. We don't just say "That's so cool!" but also "uncool" and "not a cool move" and "amazingly cool thing to say." It's not clear to me that "bad" has ever "meant" its nominal opposite in the same way. "Bad motherfucker"? Yes, but what about "unbad"? Or "not a bad move" or "amazingly bad thing to say"? (Hence the usefulness of "bad-ass") In other words, "bad" doesn't "mean" "good", and never has to the best of my knowledge– it's a performance of usage that depends upon certain parameters to work (a common phenomenon, to be sure). Definitely part of the word's range, and it belongs in the dictionary, but nothing like the case of "cool."

    The "positive" yabai strikes me like the positive use of "bad." To the best of my knowledge, the great majority of usage in this sense is implicitly predicative, often with a performative, exclamatory element. You can definitely find counterexamples, I've know I've heard some, but I still feel it's a short step from "That's like…wow" or "This cookie! OMG!"

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