February 20, 2009

Japanes Slang: Big Hair and Blinging Accessories


I'm going to give you two related slang words today. First: アゲ嬢.
Breakdown--
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"
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.



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--
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).
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!
Here is a video tutorial that teaches you how to decoru your own cell phone:

--
bonus links on this subject:
  • An agejyou blog (scroll down for デコった calculators)
  • A big hair supporter, modeled by a classy white lady
  • Link to buy the dekoru mask. I should be payed for this... oh wait, you won't be buying one?
  • --
    [*]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.

    2 comments:

    1. I think Patrick Macias talks about guy fashion that is similar to this sometimes on his blog: http://patrickmacias.blogs.com/er/

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