Mai Waifu

It’s funny how words move from one language group to another in this hyper-connected world we live in. Like the hilarious phrase “mai waifu” (my wife, but misspelled on purpose), first uttered by Kimura-sensei from Azumanga Daioh and used today by anime fans whenever they want to express their devotion to a particular anime character (as in “Kagami-chan is mai waifu!“). The other day I was checking my Twitter feed and reading some tweets by Japanese people who were following me. One person said, “Now in Akiba,” but instead of writing the word “now” in Japanese (which would be 今, ima), or perhaps writing the English word in katakana (the writing system reserved for writing foreign words, which would be ナウ), he wrote “now” using hiragana (なう), usually only used for Japanese words or grammatical particles. I wondered why Japanese users would purposely write a word incorrectly, than I thought of the meme of “mai waifu” and realized it was a similar phenomenon.