Bikkuri Tales

I am so mad at LOST right now. I’m not even going to get in to this whole new episode/old episode bullpocky,  but what I saw last night was near unforgivable.

A doctor was talking to the charachter Sun, in Korean, and in the subtitles, right there on the small screen for the nation to see was the incorrect use of the word “you’re”. I felt for a moment like I was reading a blog or something… a doctor was talking to Sun, and I forget the exact line, but it was something like “You’re test results were fine.”

YOU’RE?! This isn’t some crappy livejournal! This is a hugely popular nationall broadcast television show! What the hell! Surely I can’t be the only one who noticed… because that is one of the most annoying things anyone can do in the English language, mix up those two.

Ugh! LOST! I shake my fist at you!!

This morning, on my walk to work, I thought about making an appointment to see the optometrist, an eye appointment, or, an ‘eyeppointment’.

To me, this makes perfect sense, and I thought, what other situations would this work with? A babyppointment, a hairppointment,  a podiappointment… why waste time saying the whole thing when you can get it out of the way quicker? But would anyone understand what you mean? I guess it’s all about context… most people are able to decipher meaning from little clues. For instance, if you were to write a word on a piece of paper, and cover half of it, most people would be able to figure it out… their minds would connect the dots.

This type of language is found very frequently Japanese. In Japanese, there is a lot of implied meaning, and a lot of contextual meaning, and of course, a lot of abbriviation.

Common in Japanese, I looked to examples in America of this trend, to see if it might be catching on here, and the one place I found it the most common was on The Simpsons! Tomacco, Adultivity, Frogurt… these are all examples from The Simpsons of this new language trend.

Do you use this type of abbreviations? Language is always evolving, and these are the kinds of things that sneak into our everyday language without us knowing it. Are there any that you use in your everyday speech?

You know, once “bad” used to mean “good”. But language has a habit of always changing, and so today bad has regained it’s status as demarking something as actually bad, but what about for those of us who hang on to new tradition? In the modern lexicon, if I want to say something is “bad”, using the circa 1990 definition, I have to use a qualifier, like “bad-ass” or “bad-ical”. Is this fair?

I have to wonder what other things will change in 10 year’s time. Recently I heard a new term, “scary”, which would mean something evokes fear. But the way it was used in this situation was… well, here:

“My homegirl and I was at this club and this white girl was muggin my homegirl all hella crazy, so she kept muggin and I was like ‘Yo do you know that girl’ and homegirl was like ‘Hell nah I don’t know her’. But next thing I know the girl straight punched my homegirl in the face and they was on the floor until security came, but afterwords my homegirl was all like ‘Why you gotta be scary? Why you actin’ all hella scary? Why din’choo have my back?’ and now she’s mad at me, so we ain’t homegirls no more. I wasn’ bein’ hella scary at all, that bitch is crazy”

Like that.

If you know any gems to add to the lexicon, please let me know. And don’t cheat and just pick something off of Urban Dictionary, either. I want regional flavor.

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