We can divide obsolete Japanese vocabulary into two categories: kogo 古語, “old words,” and shigo 死語, “dead words.” Kogo held respectable careers in pre-modern Japan but retired quietly at some point before the Meiji restoration. Shigo are more recent and violent casualties — many began as conscious neologisms in response to the same accelerating social change that would later render them irrelevant. All shigo once rubbed shoulders with the surviving portion of modern Japanese. Kogo haunt the language with dignity, like ghosts in an ancestral mansion; shigo lie unquiet in shallow graves out back. There is a reason that shigo are also known as haigo 廃語: “abandoned words.”

Naui 「ナウい」was a mayfly of a word, declared dead almost as soon as it was born, reviled as a desperate attempt to squeeze a few more youth dollars out of an already-uncool borrowed English lexeme (”now”). As a word in its own right, nau had already demonstrated a tenacity rivaling Madeline Usher’s, but naui was fated to surpass its progenitor in every respect. It became a lexicographic Cartaphilus ― cursed to wander the sentences of Japanese forever, scorned and reviled but never granted the peace of oblivion. Its unforgivable sin? To once have both been and meant “fashionable.”

According to Takahashi Nobuo’s dictionary of Showa buzzwords (「昭和世相流行語辞典―ことば昭和史 WORD&WORDS」), naui’s story begins in 1972 — the year that nau entered the language as a bona-fide loan word, written in kana and used as a na adjective. This was a logical development, Takahashi notes, from the popularity of English NOW (in Roman characters) used in similar contexts the previous year.

Nau collocates closely with yangu (”young”), as in nau na yangu (”the groovy youth of today”). Nau and nau na yangu even share an entry in the first volume of Kobayashi Nobuhiko’s Contemporary Shigo Notebook (『現代「死語」ノート』). Kobayashi deems nau “a shigo among shigo,” one that is “just plain embarrassing.” He also claims that even back then, it was used “less by actual young people than by adults pandering to them,” and that it died almost immediately.

Naui itself, then, is an -i adjective derived from the same English root. It seems to have turned up at the end of the seventies in what Kobayashi, in the second volume of his Notebook (『現代“死語”ノート〈2〉1977‐1999』), calls a “shigo counteroffensive.” The online Dictionary of Japanese Slang also places the birth of naui in 1979.

Back then, naui wasn’t without competition. For example, imai 「今い」, was a roughly contemporaneous and structurally identical synonym based on the Japanese word for “now” instead of the English one. But naui bested all contenders on sheer charisma. The precise image it invokes of an awkward middle-aged man finger-quote “rapping” with the finger-quote “kids” kept it in the vocabulary of both middle-aged men oblivious to their own awkwardness and all those embarrassed by and for same. (This blog entry traces the survival of naui in literature and the media through the Famicom age and beyond, even expressing doubts as to whether naui deserves its shigo status at all.)

One interesting recent appearance of naui was in the straight-to-convenience-store Cyclopedia of Messed-Up Heisei Words (『図解 平成ぶっこわれコトバ事典』) of 2005. This grave and scholarly work records naui yatsu as an ironic term applied to people who are insufficiently fashionable. In some cases, then, naui has come to mean its own opposite: to be called naui is to be mocked for insufficient, well, now-ness.

If indeed naui is to be deprived even of the right to mean what it means, perhaps the correct metaphor is not Wandering ‘Djective but Struldbrug: “looked on as dead in law” but nightmarishly alive, imprisoned in an increasingly ridiculous and pitiful form and reduced to begging for whatever scraps of favor it can get.

Genki is the first Japanese word most learn upon arriving in the country. It’s fun, it’s useful, it’s easy to pronounce. It means “energy, pep, health,” and you can usually find someone on hand to explain that the kanji 元気 mean “original spirit” or similarly, are indicative of a positive worldview in which the default state for a human is to be in good health and high vigor.

This may be what genki means today, but the history of the word is far more complex. A 1988 paper by Ran Chikumin (栾竹民), modestly entitled “Some thoughts on three spellings of genki” (「減氣・験氣・元氣」小考), goes back thousands of years to lay out the facts for us:

• The term 元気 was used in ancient China, but not to mean “health” or “vitality”. Instead it referred to a ubiquitous, primal energy that made up all things: “元氣者、天地之始、万物之祖” (”Genki is the beginning of heaven and earth and the ancestor of the myriad things”).
• In Japan, the word 減気 (also pronounced genki) was invented by Heian scholars writing in Chinese to describe a reduction (減) in the energy (気) of an illness. 減気, which bore no relation to the much less common 元気 despite the coincidental homophony, soon spread from straight kanbun to other forms of writing. And so, for example, you find Dōgen in the 13th century saying things like 「種々ニ療治セシニ依テ少キ減氣アリシカレドモ」 (”Following a range of treatments, there was some remission in his illness, but…”). In other words, unlike ancient 元気, classical 減気 was very close to the genki of today.

• Sometime in the Muromachi period, a trend began towards writing genki with the characters 験気. These had the same pronunciation but had previously been used for a different genki meaning a positive effect observed after ritual or prayer.
• By the Edo period, 験気 had more or less taken over from 減気 as the preferred spelling for genki as in “get well”. It had also obtained an extra, related meaning: “be well”, without any implied recovery from an unwell state.

• Later in the Edo period, the spelling changed to 元気, bringing the modern meaning and spelling together for the first time. Ran suggests that this may have been for a combination of reasons: the shift in meaning away from the subsiding of an illness and towards health in general, influence from dictionaries and other authoritative texts (including medical texts), and most intriguingly, collateral damage from the ongoing Neo-Confucian debate over whether ki (気, energy) and ri (理, principle) were of equal importance (理気二元論), or whether ri was secondary to the primal ki (気一元論).

In other words, Ran argues, modern genki is a chimera, a relatively recent combination of a straightforward word that describes illness receding and a philosophical concept with millennia of metaphysical baggage. To the extent that it has a deep philosophical meaning, it acquired it by phonetic accident.

Never forget: a kanji is a lie.

Truly understanding a “foreign culture” requires a tight grasp on its language. So we at Néojaponisme will now offer a bi-weekly vocabulary lesson that looks at a single Japanese word or phrase and its cultural context. Although these posts should be particularly helpful for language students, I hope they will not be too pedantic for our general readership.

When making requests to others, the wording is crucial for differentiating between military command, sorrowful pleading, and prostrate kowtow. In a language and culture as hierarchical as Japanese, there are a vast number of linguistic options for appeal, each properly respecting the speaker’s place within an organizational structure.

So when it comes to action heroes, CEOs, and tough guys, they don’t have the time or the patience for the standard pleases of onegai (お願い) or kudasai (下さい). The proper phrasing for a man of means is tanomu yo (頼むよ). Tanomu is a verb meaning “to ask someone to do something.” In the polite verb form tanomimasu the speaker can state “I plead with you. / I beg you” to superiors with the level of sad desperation inherent in that English translation. “Tanomu yo” can also be bandied about between friends making desperate requests.

But out in the real world, you will probably run into “tanomu yo” in its favored gruff masculine praxis. This is the word of choice for 24’s Jack Bauer, Lost’s Jack Shepard, Michael Douglas in The Game, and Twin Peaks‘ FBI Agent Dale Cooper. Subtitlers would never make such powerful male protagonists stoop to using more polite terms. (And conveniently, “頼むよ” is a brisk three-characters compared to its alternatives.)

In fact, “tanomu yo” mostly exists these days solely in the world of films and fiction. Due to the gradual declines in white-collar office hierarchy and blurring in daily life’s chain-of-command, there are fewer and fewer “Division Chiefs” who get to bark “tanomu yo” to their charges. So maybe you will have to hold off on using this phrase until a big promotion. But remember: “tanomu yo” is always ready for you if suddenly you are required to stop terrorists from detonating a nuclear bomb or fighting supernatural predators. At that point, you will realize there’s just not enough time to deal with formalities of polite speech.