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Vol.62
Words Change with Times |
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Sep 21,2021 |
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There was the popular saying "Songs change with the times and the times change with songs" in the golden days of mood songs. It means that songs and the times change together, and if this is correct, we could also say, "Words change with the times and the times change with words."
I am not too smart to understand any words written in one hundred Japanese waka poems.
Speaking of words, there seems to be no idea of what words were spoken among ordinary people who lived in tenement houses in the Edo period, which lasted until about 150 years ago. The Edo period was said to have one of the world's highest literacy rates. However, no documents describing such ordinary people's words remain, so I heard that most of the words used in period movies or dramas are inaccurate.
Another example is that words used in email among today's young people are abbreviated as much as possible, so they do not make sense for me with a few exceptions such as "Akeome (a shortened version of "Akemashite Omedeto (Happy New Year)")." In a distant future when the custom of sending New Year's greeting cards is already extinct, "Akeome" may be an archaic word and need to be looked up in an etymological dictionary.
Spoken or written words are important tools to express our feelings, but I think that the current trend of parents giving unusual or unreadable names to their children has lost sight of the original naming purpose.
Judging from these trends, including the above abbreviation, is it too much to say that the collapse of the Japanese word culture has already begun on a surface level?
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