I'm going to give you two related slang words today. First: アゲ嬢.
Breakdown--So an agejyou is a girl that follows the fashions in the magazine, which displays a lot of キャバクラ嬢, or hostess fashion. Agejyou girls look kind of trampy, overly made-up, pale (trying to look white), sport alien-looking eyes, and have freaky-long art-nails. Also, I have been in Japan too long, because I am starting to like it. Ageha needs support groups for the girls that follow it, as well as boys like me, apparently (we can call it Ageha Anonymous!). Segwayishly, I wonder if on the guy side of things there is a word for host fashion followers. That will be my homework for the next slang post, but Dear Reader is free to tell us in the comments.
age: comes from 小悪魔ageha, a fashion magazine (not a typo, that's the official name's appearance in print)
jyou: an honorific, basically the equivalent of "miss" or "young woman"
On to the related word: Agejyou girls love their デコる. Or if I was going to say that in a grammatically correct way, I might have said デコり[*]
instead, for デコる is a verb that means to decorate something with bling.
Breakdown--I have to admit that I am coming to like decoru as well! I mean, I have seen my fair share of tacky plastic diamonds glued to things in America, but they have elevated it to a true art form over here!
deco: from デコレーション, decoration, though the native word is 飾る.
ru: This is something that gets slapped onto words sometimes to make them into conjugatable verbs. Another example is ググる (guguru, to google).
Here is a video tutorial that teaches you how to decoru your own cell phone:
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bonus links on this subject:
[*]To further complicate things, the word started out as デコり and became デコる later, as you can see in the mask ad, dekori is still well present.
I think Patrick Macias talks about guy fashion that is similar to this sometimes on his blog: http://patrickmacias.blogs.com/er/
ReplyDeletean interesting link, thanks!
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