Mixing English and Japanese Grammar

Everyone knows that adding ‘y’ to the end of a noun can turn it into an adjective, like silky, messy, rainy, or healthy, and since Japanese usually study six years of English before finishing high school, people generally have a working knowledge of the grammar here. It’s common for makers of products to play with English in ways that can be very creative, spawning a line of ladies’ support stockings that bears the name Supporty or a deep-cleaning shampoo called Rooty, or “Home, Homer, Homest” as the slogan for a construction company. Japanese also reverse engineer the grammar of English to create new slang terms. For example, new words are commonly made by, say, removing the “tic” ending from a word like “dramatic” or “aromatic” and tacking it onto a Japanese words, creating “otome-tic” (pronounced oh-toh-meh-CHI-ku), meaning something that a girl would do, like having a pink box of tissue on her desk, or gaijiin-tic (gai-jin-CHI-kku), meaning something that you’d expect a foreigner to do, like speak Japanese with an exaggerated accent. There’s also a word called “adult-tic” (adaruto-chikku) which serves as a softer euphemism for referring to mature themes.

You have to watch out for those gaijin. You never know what crazy stuff they’ll do.