One thing I like about the Japanese is how creative they are with language. The other day I was choosing bento lunches in a convenience store with my wife, and she described one as being very “volumey” (that is, having a large volume of food), which seemed like a cute word to me somehow. There’s a grand tradition of twisting the grammar of English to make new words, called 和製英語 wasei eigo or “made in Japan English,” and some examples include “nighter” (a baseball game at night), “career up” (getting a promotion at work) or “mayoler” (someone who loves mayonnaise). The Japanese also love to take English suffixes like the -tic ending in words like “dramatic” and mix them with Japanese in whimsical ways, creating words like 乙女チックotome-tic, girl + –tic, meaning feminine or girly, or 秋葉チック Akiba-tic, meaning “related to Akihabara subculture in some way.” Anime has plenty of creative English words too, from Get Backers to U.N. Spacy to Shizuri from A Certain Scientific Railgun, who possess an esper power known as “Meltdowner.”
Shizuri from Railgun is a “Meltdowner.”
