KY Is Not Just Short For Kentucky Anymore

Language is a bug. It evolves, it adapts, it changes, it pisses us off sometimes. It’s not the stale words that permeate textbooks. It’s not the one-line phrases with a noun, direct object and verb that constitute a clause which we memorize to scrape through an oral proficiency exam. It’s constantly in flux, mutating and tormenting all those trying to learn the language from the ground up.

My kids do not speak Japanese. Oh no. They speak a language that is riddled with all sorts of colloquialisms and contractions that makes them utterly unintelligible to me at times. Like most young people they pick up their slang from pop culture, the street, television, and men in nothing but underwear briefs jumping around like buffoons making spectacles of themselves on television. This all causes me to feel like a consummate fossil as I utter my textbook prim and proper “hoontodesuka” and “uso” when I want to express a feeling of incredulity. I have not been blessed to have been educated by a man in nothing but his skivvies.

“No, no,” says one of my students, a first year sassy girl with front teeth that betray a fondness for candy who sits in the front row. She has the headphones from the listening station at her desk snuggly around her neck and has just finished impersonating a DJ rather well might I add.

“Do it like this: ‘DONDAKE~~~~’” she says.

She sniggers at my attempt. I cannot perfect this term. This phrase, roughly meaning “NO WAY!” that has been infiltrating schools after some transvestite in the notoriously gay community of Shinjuku bellowed it on television. You’d think living in Greenwich Village for four years I would have picked up a thing or two.

I am at the local technical all boys high school. My teacher and I are walking to class and she comments on how much she thinks I resemble a local television personality who goes by the name of ベッキー / Becky. Despite us having a similar haircut, I notice no great similarities.

The teacher begins the class. “Good morning, class! Okay, today we are lucky to have Becky-sensei here with us!”

A prolonged, awkward pause infiltrates the classroom until finally the boys guffaw with laughter.

“DAYYYMN, SENSEI. KY!!!”

“THAT’S NOT HER NAME. WOW. KY.”

“THAT WAS SO KY.”

“HAHA DAMN, SHE IS SOOOO KY.”

The boys shake their heads and look between the Japanese teacher and me, their eyes full of pity for the deteriorating memories of their elders.

Click. Thankfully, a student had introduced me into this term the previous day, but was unable to fully explain it to me. Almost like magic, and unlike the eight million polite and humble terms meaning “to eat” that I have waded lugubriously through in my textbook, I hear this simple term in actual daily conversation. The meaning manifests itself clearly. KY, which is an abbreviation for kuki ga yomenai (空気が読めない), means literally – “can’t read the air,” or more conversationally, one who is entirely clueless or doesn’t understand what’s going on. Or, as I translate it in my head, “You complete and utter moron.”

It’s a phrase which, since that encounter, I hear darting around the office at rapid speeds, sprinkling down beads of stupidity on its addressee, torrents of cool on its user and allowing me, at the very least, to understand that someone else at that very moment might be as clueless as I am regarding their surroundings. Bewildering verbs, mysterious adverbs and cryptic conjugations precede and follow but at least there is that one good old keyword that allows me to go, “AH HAH! I KNOW WHAT’S GOING ON!” for a radiantly clear 3.2 seconds.

The terrain around me shifts. A slew of girls around me start beating their left feet vigorously against the ground as their left arms fiercely engage in an up and down sawing motion. They pause in their seizure-like convulsions to try to get me to join in. What for the love of Pete are you doing?

“Sonna no kankei nee (そんあの関係ねえ！ - “It doesn’t matter!!),” they thunder in unison. As they stop beating the earth and sawing they erupt into another cry: “Oppappi!! (オッパッピー！ - Ocean Pacific Peace!!)”

I will later learn that these girls are not completely psychotic, nor part of some fearsome cult that worships the Pacific Ocean with the ever-mighty invisible saw. They, along with the rest of Japan, have picked up these expressions from a comedian named Yoshio Kojima, a man who runs around sporting a red loincloth spreading these delightful (and apparently uproarious) seeds of joy. I am still unsure why this instigates the hysterics that it does among high school students, as it causes me to do nothing more than furrow my brow and wrinkle my nose slightly in distaste, but I suppose if we were to show them Ashton Kutcher and Seann William Scott hollering “SWEET!” (あまい／甘い) and “DUDE!” (だておとこ／伊達男) in a never-ending loop, they’d be equally puzzled.

PS – Will someone please tell me what the devil Ocean Pacific Peace is?

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Published:
12.6.07 / 9am
Category:
classroom antics, amusing incidents, what i call life, culture