Tuesday, May 11, 2010

TPO

tei-pi-o-, "time, place and occasion".

During a conversation with her Japanese friend, a student was told and patiently explained this word, TPO. However she was still not able to understand the point, and seeked for a further explanation from me. Unfortunately I am totally out of clue, never heard this word before. Again I checked online dictionaries and confirmed with other young Japanese students. Surely there is a such word and it is reasonabaly widely used in certain circumstance. Obviously this is another "KY word", and in fact I even wrote about this language phenomenon in a very general sense somewhereelse.

I can imagine that the Japanese student must have tried hard to find out a new word to show visitors from Canada. However it seems to me that this is rather too special to present core features of Japanese.

「KY」な日本語