For your education and entertainment purposes, a few more katakana loan words that didn’t work out exactly as intended.
These words of encouragement didn’t even resemble any English word in my mind and it took me a while to figure out that it actually came from English at all. One common place to hear this is school sports teams but it is sometimes used in the business world or with friends. It comes from the English words “Don’t mind” and basically means “Don’t worry about it?” I don’t feel stupid for not realizing this right away. This loanword, like many others, took a shortcut in accuracy in exchange for convenience. It’s ok, Don mai!
This one baffles me as well. When spelled out in romaji, “Oorai” certainly doesn’t look like it came from English but after hearing numerous Japanese men yelling it out to parking cars, you can easily figure out that it comes from the English world “Alright”. But why go through the effort of adopting such a useful and versatile words if you are going to limit it to it’s least common usage? When asked how you are doing, or when describing if a movie was good or not, you never hear the word “Oorai”. It is used solely for the purpose of helping drivers back up. Talk about Mottainai.
This word bothers me because it paints an image (no pun intended) of something very different. The first thing I thought of when I first heard “irasuto” is the word it sounds most similar to “lust”. Maybe I just have a dirty mind but my common sense never lead me to think this could possibly mean “illustration”. The actually meaning and the sound “lust” always conjures up an inappropriate image in my mind and I feel like I need to lower my voice when I say this word. I guess I’m not 100% used to Japanese life after all.
In high school I would make up words similar to this one. I would turn nouns and adjectives into verbs, however ridiculous it sounded. For example “I frogged him” meant “I threw a frog at him”. I suppose this makes me as guilty as the Japanese of breaking the rules of the English language for their own amusement. In Japanese, “cunning” is used as a verb and means to trick people, so in other words “She cunninged me” means “She tricked me”. Japan has way fewer scams than the rest of Asia but just in case, be careful not to be cunninged.
Apparently there are two kinds of smart people. One is really intelligent and the other has a really hot body. Smart is often used in Japanese to refer to someone who is thin or slender. I have heard from certain people that this actually is real native English somewhere in some time period for someone, but not for myself or most of the Americans I know. On the contrary, this was quite baffling for me at first. Keep in mind that the real meaning of smart is also included in this word.
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