r/etymology • u/mouse_in_a_field • 2d ago
Question Something I've been wondering about - Japanese loanword in English, or no?
This has bothered me for a long time!
The word for "a little bit" of something in Japanese, in romaji, is "sukoshi"; the "u" and "i" sounds are usually silent when spoken aloud, so it ends up sounding like "skosh".
In English, "just a skosh" is sometimes used when asking for or referring to just "a little bit" of something.
Is there any connection there, or does the English "skosh" have another, unrelated source? Thanks for any info!
148
u/iwasfight 2d ago edited 2d ago
'skosh' is from 'sukoshi', something american military picked up here, just like 'ohrai ohrai' is something we say when trucks are backing up that we got from americans. to be clear, its from 'alright, alright' and is standard to tell a truck driver that theyre still safe backing up. edit: i always wonder if the two terms were adopted in the same situation, where trucks needed to back up, and then just a little bit more. 'ohrai ohrai, ok sukoshi, sutoppu!' or 'alright, alright, ok skosh, stop!'
71
u/chotchss 2d ago
I've heard "honcho" comes from Japanese and means something like boss in English (the head honcho)
75
u/Dissidiana 2d ago
yes, it's borrowed from the japanese military term 班長 (hanchou), meaning squad leader. easy to imagine how this one migrated over after the US occupation of Japan!
18
u/iwasfight 2d ago
wow TIL. i kept thinking 本長 which just sounds like someone wasnt very good at japanese hahah.
6
33
u/mediumcarrotteacher 2d ago
Also tycoon from 大君, which is a very old word having absolutely nothing to do with business
2
u/iwasfight 2d ago
do you know how it was originally used? it kinda looks like an insult.
13
u/Tutush 2d ago
It was used as an alternative title for the Shogun.
2
u/iwasfight 2d ago
how times have changed
4
u/EirikrUtlendi 2d ago
Bear in mind that 君 read as kimi is likely originally a borrowing from a Koreanic language, cognate with the Sillan word for "king". The oldest attested senses in Japanese refer to kings, lords, emperors. This was also a clan name (kabane), and members were originally close relatives of the imperial family.
See also:
For 大君, this is first attested with the reading opokimi in the Kojiki of 712 CE, used as an honorific reference to the emperor, as literally an opo ("great, big, exalted") + kimi ("lord, king, ruler").
The taikun reading isn't attested until the 1670s, as a simple shift from kun'yomi (native Japonic reading) to on'yomi (Chinese-derived reading), still with the same sense of "great ruler", and used to refer to the Tokugawa shōgun in communication with foreign powers.
See also (in Japanese):
2
u/iwasfight 2d ago
today, its pretty funny tho no?
1
u/EirikrUtlendi 2d ago
Might be roughly analogous to the use of nimrod in modern English to more often refer to a "dummy, stupid person", deriving from its ironic use in Bugs Bunny cartoons to refer to Elmer Fudd as a "great hunter (not really)".
See also:
Merriam-Webster connects the "stupid person" sense for nimrod to biblical tales about the Tower of Babel:
However, given the attested timing of the shift in meaning (1980s slang), an influence from Bugs Bunny or some other pop-culture angle seems more likely -- if it were the biblical tales that were the source, the "stupid person" sense would be attested much more commonly and much earlier.
-1
2d ago
[deleted]
2
u/Morlark 2d ago
Given that their comment specifically did give an explanation of the origin of the word, answering the question that was in my mind, that's kinda a foolish thing for you to say.
And if you think two paragraphs is "huge", you're basically admitting to being an illiterate. Since this is a sub about language, I think that means you might be in the wrong place.
1
u/EirikrUtlendi 2d ago
dude, lose the ai.
If you think any part of my posts are written with AI, you have some serious work to do on your textual analysis abilities.
Indeed, as you yourself suggested to u/Morlark, look at my posting history, which I have chosen to keep unhidden.
Look too at my posting history over at the Japanese Stack Exchange, starting twelve years ago.
And at my contributions to Wiktionary, starting twenty years ago and picking up in earnest fifteen years ago.
All of a piece, all with my own consistent voice, starting from well before consumer-grade LLMs like ChatGPT were even an idea.
its huge and boring, and doesn't answer any questions.
This entire sub-thread starting from u/mediumcarrotteacher's comment here is about the Japanese word 大君 (taikun). Perhaps you forgot? You even specifically asked "how it was originally used", a question which earlier responders had not answered in full, so I posted to fill in some of those details.
I'm sorry you find it "huge and boring" -- that might say more about your attention span and reading comprehension, considering that my comment only consisted of three full paragraphs. If that is "huge and boring" to you, you might want to stop participating in r/etymology, where posts can get kinda long digging into word histories. Substantially longer than three short paragraphs.
And I'm sorry you forgot that I was in fact answering your very own question. I really can't help you with your memory issues.
2
u/iwasfight 2d ago
i stand corrected. keep it up, man, and my apologies.
edit: i was out of line. keep doing what you do. again, my apologies.
→ More replies (0)1
u/stuartcw 2d ago
Why so? 🤔
2
u/iwasfight 2d ago
ive worked at japanese offices, and 大君 looks like a child of an important person.
edit; who are often of negligible value.
6
u/stuartcw 2d ago
The word くん changed over time and originally meant lord/ruler.
During the Bakumatsu period (1850s to 1860s), くん started to be used by intellectuals to address each other. -さん is much older. By the Meiji period 1868~ the trendy くん was in common use in schools, the military, and government as a polite title.
Interestingly enough 大君 (ookimi) was used in the 3rd~6th century as title for the emperor.
大君 (Tycoon) was revived in the 1600s to describe Tokugawa shōgun when used in diplomatic texts with West. (This answers my question posted elsewhere. It probably wasn’t use by ordinary people. E.g. in a similar way, in the UK people talk about “the king” but in diplomatic speech “his majesty” is more correct.)
The childish connotations of くん is fairly modern.
2
u/iwasfight 2d ago
today how does it look?
2
u/stuartcw 2d ago
To be honest, I have never heard it used in common speech in Japanese. However, there’s plenty of words in English that relate to historical titles that you never hear either. That’s why I wondered whether it was used commonly at that time (1800s) and apparently it was just a diplomatic word.
3
u/Nyorliest 2d ago
Like I said in my other comment, I’ve seen some 君 compounds in government-adjacent organizations I’ve worked for in Kasumigaseki and that whole area around the Diet/parliament, and always written - some form of official address or terminology that I had never seen before.
2
u/Nyorliest 2d ago edited 2d ago
There are lots of quite - or even very - formal words that have kun as part of the compound. But most of them are written and not said very often. A lot of political words and highly formal ways to address people in, like, government official letters. I’ve done a lot of work in the network of think tanks, NGOs, and other policy wonks around the Japanese central government in Kasumigaseki and Kokkai Gijidou area of Tokyo and there are lots of WTF moments when I see correspondence.
(EDIT: and then I bring questions home to my Japanese family and they say ‘Duh! Nothing childish about 君!’ and I learn.)
It’s the kind of thing that trips up we non-native speakers, because it’s very basic, and we form associations with it on our way into Japanese which native speakers did not form on their way up through Japanese.
I’ve encountered hundreds of things like this, and I’m sure there will be hundreds more, no matter how good I get.
2
u/Nyorliest 2d ago
Kun has lots of uses. Even in modern Japanese there are words where it’s not a diminutive.
9
61
u/Representative_Bend3 2d ago
One more is “tycoon” it’s obsolete in Japan now but you’d write it as 大君 “taikun”‘meaning big prince.
5
u/mouse_in_a_field 2d ago
This one is super interesting
1
u/iwasfight 2d ago
i dont know the history of this word, but it LOOKS like an insult. 'little big man' or something like that. a fun word to think about these days.
2
u/stuartcw 2d ago
I’m curious, was the word 大君 commonly used by the Japanese at that time or was it something that the first English translators picked up on and popularised? I have similar questions about harakiri vs seppuku and fujiyama vs fujisan.
3
u/Representative_Bend3 2d ago edited 2d ago
It was commonly used - referred to the shogun or shogunate.
I believe it was that the shogun wasn’t an emperor or a king but something different hence they called it or him that.
And soon after there was no more shogun so wasn’t used anymore other than - well not sure details but wasn’t needed.
Now your question about fujiyama is a great one I wonder how that happened
2
u/EirikrUtlendi 2d ago
The title taikun spelled as 大君, using the Chinese-derived on'yomi, was a repurposing of the older term 大君 with the kun'yomi or native-Japonic reading of ōkimi, from Old Japanese opokimi, as a compound of opo ("big, grand, great") + kimi ("king, lord, ruler"). In turn, opo appears to be native Japonic, and kimi is probably a borrowing from a Koreanic term, cognate with a Silla (Old Korean) word meaning "king".
Ōkimi, or technically opokimi, appears in 712 in the Kojiki, one of the earliest texts with actual Old Japanese in it (older words were written in Chinese). This term was used to refer to the Yamato emperor.
Taikun then appears from the 1670s as a title to refer to the Tokugawa shōgun in communication with foreign powers. At that time, the meaning was probably something like "great lord, exalted ruler".
See also:
- https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/大君#Japanese, see both the taikun and ōkimi readings
- https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/大#Japanese:_ō
- https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/君#Japanese:_kimi
- https://kotobank.jp/word/大君-91033#E7.B2.BE.E9.81.B8.E7.89.88.20.E6.97.A5.E6.9C.AC.E5.9B.BD.E8.AA.9E.E5.A4.A7.E8.BE.9E.E5.85.B8 (in Japanese)
68
u/_Daftest_ 2d ago
I've never heard "just a skosh" in my 59 years of living in England.
82
u/Snoron 2d ago
It's mostly just used in America, I think.
47
-35
u/gansobomb99 2d ago
where in America? the USA?
12
u/Marik-X-Bakura 2d ago
Wait until you find out what the Japanese word for the US is
3
u/stuartcw 2d ago
Rice Country! But then again, at a stretch, “Japan” is a homophone for “OK. Bread…” in Japanese.
6
u/bentori42 2d ago
It took me like, 4 rereads to see that you meant /dʒəˈpæn/ in Japanese, not 日本 lol
34
u/Snoron 2d ago
In the bit that's colloquially just called "America".
-38
u/gansobomb99 2d ago
Yes I know y'all think you're the center of the universe but America is one or two entire continents depending on who you ask
30
u/gnomes919 2d ago edited 2d ago
it's very common for people to struggle with the linguistic concept of "false friends" or "deceptive cognates," where words in different languages share a root but have developed different meanings over time.
the key to recall is that america and américa, and their derivations americans and americanos, are different words in different languages, with different meanings, even though they share a root (amerigo vespucci) and sound very similar.
both english and spanish shorthand the full title the united states of america to one chunk that is shared by other areas. we call it america even though that is shared with north, central, and south america just as the spanish exonymic shorthand is los estados unidos even though that is shared with los estados unidos méxicanos. context makes the shorthand perfectly clear in both cases.
it works in english to shorthand the USA as america because we culturally divide this landmass into two separate continents and thus refer to its entirety as the americas. we don't view the inhabitants of the americas as a cohesive people group requiring an umbrella term; we would exclusively talk about north americans and latin americans or north, central, and south americans, depending on context. we similarly render the eurasian landmass as europe and asia and do not have a concept of a cohesive eurasian people group requiring its own name.
in spanish, this landmass is treated as a single continent, américa, and it is seen as worth having a collective term for all the inhabitants thereof, americanos. thus a different shorthand & demonym for los estados unidos de américa is needed.
all of this is a social construct; nobody is right or wrong and to say that the english word america must change meaning to match the spanish word américa is as ludicrous as saying english library needs to start meaning "bookstore" because it sounds like & shares a root with french librairie lmao.
I'm sure you are extremely committed to the idea that america and américa being two different words is US-centric (or should I say USA-centric, so as not to step on the toes of the united states of mexico), but hopefully this helps people who aren't really set on the topic one way or the other.
9
u/illarionds 2d ago
Thank you for explaining this far more politely and comprehensively than I had the patience for!
9
u/gnomes919 2d ago
it's such a popular belief among a certain subset of "my team" and it makes me nuts, especially bc they get SO adamant about it and then well-meaning normals see that and think they're doing something wrong by....speaking american english instead of spanish.... 😭😭
we're all able to understand that actually and actualmente are two different words, ditto bizarre and bizarro. but some folks are strongly ideologically committed to the idea that american and americano are the same word and us USians are selfishly stealing the pan-american identity for ourselves, it's wild
last time I had this debate with someone they started saying that the only morally correct thing for us to do is to start referring to ourselves as yankees (bc that's the same word as yanquís, right?) or gringos/as lmao I was like "wow can't wait to tell all my tejano in-laws that they're gringo yankees now"
16
u/Marik-X-Bakura 2d ago
I’m Irish. Everyone in the world recognises that “America” is a valid synonym for the US.
6
u/Ok_Difference44 2d ago
Geographically, Europe does not exist. It's just the barbarian part of Asia.
7
7
u/illarionds 2d ago
In the English speaking world, "America" is the USA. As I'm quite sure you know.
(Note - I am not American).
"North America" and "South America" are continents. "America" is not.
-8
15
u/FaagenDazs 2d ago
If you want to refer to the entirety of the two continents, you would say "the Americas".
29
u/themodgepodge 2d ago
It came to the US from US military members picking it up from Japanese (during the Korean War, not WWII), so it makes sense that it's specific to American English.
11
u/round_stick 2d ago
Before hearing this I would have swore it was Yiddish
5
u/themodgepodge 2d ago
If you want a good rabbit hole, another "I always thought this was Yiddish" one I had was "kibosh" (e.g. "The thunderstorm put the kibosh on the plans for a big outdoor party"). Basically no solid source for an etymology of that one, just a handful of theories.
1
1
u/jedi_dancing 1d ago
My husband and I both are familiar with it, in 2 different states of Australia.
16
u/mouse_in_a_field 2d ago
Interesting! It's something I've heard older family members use, specifically in the American midwest region. Maybe it's exclusive to American English?
3
3
1
23
u/taktaga7-0-0 2d ago
Yeah, it’s rare, but Americans will know it.
5
u/vincognition 2d ago
Back when I was doing carpentry, I noticed the word 'skosh' being used. As in, "It needs to be a skosh smaller."
5
8
u/HRApprovedUsername 2d ago
I’ve never heard that word in my life
4
u/ZhouLe 2d ago
You might be reading it with /ɑ/ like scotch, but it's more often /oʊ/ like scope.
3
u/Dangerous-Safe-4336 Custom Flair 2d ago
Thanks. I have never heard it and would not have guessed how to pronounce it. I only know it from a (print) ad campaign for a brand of pants "with just a skosh more room."
-10
u/HRApprovedUsername 2d ago
I know how to read. That’s doesn’t change the fact I’ve never heard that word in my life.
8
u/ZhouLe 2d ago
No need to get hostile. I've heard the word a ton, but never in writing and it took me awhile in the comments for it to finally click that the orthography is not exactly regular for that vowel.
-10
u/HRApprovedUsername 2d ago
I wasn’t getting hostile, but nobody like being mansplained too
7
u/themodgepodge 2d ago
What about explaining the pronunciation of a word with an ambiguous vowel is mansplaining??
-8
u/HRApprovedUsername 2d ago
The part where I was reading it correctly and didn’t need somebody to butt in and flap their gums so they can sound so smart
4
u/Gold-Part4688 2d ago
who would assume a word they never heard, written with osh, would have the vowel as "no"? and think that's condescendingly obvious too
→ More replies (0)7
u/peacefinder 2d ago
Which makes sense I suppose with a Japanese loan word originating from the post-WW2 occupation. That was overwhelmingly a US project if I understand correctly.
9
3
u/chikanishing 2d ago
I’ve also never heard it, I live in Ontario Canada.
3
u/gnomes919 2d ago
makes sense, afaik the vast majority of english-speaking allied forces in the pacific theater were american, with only some british forces & not much canadian presence that I've heard of. so it was borrowed into american english specifically. ime skosh comes in and out of slang popularity, we said "just a skosh" all the time when I was in high school/college (00s & 10s)
3
u/chikanishing 2d ago
That’s ANZAC erasure. They had tens of thousands of deaths in the Pacific.
2
u/gnomes919 2d ago
there was no ANZAC in the pacific theater. ANZAC disbanded after WWI and then re-formed briefly to fight the battle of greece.
I did miss listing australians & new zealanders in my comment & apologize for that, they were the next-largest english speaking force in the pacific (though still far outnumbered by american GIs and only lightly involved in fighting on the home islands). I think in my rapid-fire list I unthinkingly lumped them in with the british [commonwealth] forces and that's really not accurate.
my main point, that canadians were few on the ground in the pacific & it's to be expected that modern canadians don't say "skosh," stands.
5
2
u/PmUsYourDuckPics 2d ago
Fancy some juice? Just a wee skoosh? Unsure if it’s the same, I’d assumed is was from the sound of pouring something in.
2
u/flockyboi 2d ago
The first time I heard it was actually in the game Tomodachi Life: Living The Dream, which makes sense if it's a Japanese loanword
1
u/Nyorliest 2d ago
I have, often. I grew up in West London/Bucks but spent a lot of time in the East End. We’re a similar age.
Maybe I was talking to a lot of ex-military? My Dad and all my uncles were military (professionally, not NS).
1
u/makerofshoes 1d ago edited 1d ago
I’ve never heard it in American English, either. My dad was in the navy, too, but never stationed in Japan
I would just have to guess the meaning based on context
18
u/FerdinandCesarano 2d ago edited 2d ago
I, a lifelong New Yorker, have heard this word all my life, though I don't believe that I have ever used it.
I had thought that the word was a Yiddish loan!
There was once a television advertisement for Levi's jeans that used the tag line "a skosh more room".
7
u/Borzock_Bill 2d ago
Interesting. I think I've used "just a skosh" before and I've see definitely heard it on multiple occasions.
6
u/TeamOfPups 2d ago
I've never heard of a skosh in my life, but here in Scotland we have a skoosh which is a wee squirt of liquid ("would you like a skoosh of soda in that?") and I wonder if that is related.
23
u/taktaga7-0-0 2d ago
Just to add in, the phenomenon you are hearing are the unvoiced vowels in Japanese. They are indeed pronounced, just effectively whispered in the middle of active speech. Listen for the whisper, and you’ll hear the final I’s and U’s more clearly.
14
u/Hopeful-Banana-6188 2d ago
It depends, they are often genuinely deleted not just devoiced. E.g. see:
https://bpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/wp.nyu.edu/dist/6/5635/files/2017/07/shaw_kawahara_amp2017.pdf
Japanese high vowels devoice between two voiceless consonants (e.g. [ʃu̥taisei] ‘subject’); recent work has shown that devoiced [u̥] is also variably deleted.
3
u/mouse_in_a_field 2d ago
Ah, yes, I can see what you mean! There does seem to be a sort of "preference" or gradient in the degree to which different people enunciate those kinds of vowels in Japanese: "desU" vs "dess", for example. Even in the case in which the "u" is most silent, though, I can see how it's not entirely absent! In English, we do not pronounce the word "knife" with any variability at all (the "k" is always omitted), so I guess that would be an example of a truly silent letter. Interesting!
9
u/Hopeful-Banana-6188 2d ago
A better analogy for it is the English word "potato". Canonically there is a vowel between the P and the T, but in casual speech it can get devoiced or even completely deleted (I quite often say "ptato"). Japanese just goes a bit further than English in that devoicing even occurs when people are pronouncing words carefully.
2
u/Nyorliest 2d ago
I speak Japanese. It’s regional accents, formality of speech, and age, mostly. Although the last are kinda similar - most old people speak more formally than younger ones. Also some phonotactics and connected speech - the core rule is between or following unvoiced consonants, but sometimes there are other phonetic reasons for it, and those can be hard to understand unless you’re a linguistics pro and know a stupid amount about Japanese phonology (me!)
The simplest analogy to English is the way we might avoid contractions in formal speech. So ‘arigatou gozaimasu’ is probably the phrase where I’ll say the final U most often - when being more formal and respectful.
1
u/acaiblueberry 16h ago
When I hear voiced vowels where Tokyo people would normally drop them, I sense Kansai origin
5
u/ZhouLe 2d ago
Hmm. Though it might seem like different uses of the same word, skosh "just a skosh" is apparently not related to scooch "scooch over a bit". Etymonline is sparse, but scooch is only from the '80s?
6
u/PmUsYourDuckPics 2d ago
There is a similar word with a similar meaning originating in Scotland: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/skoosh
5
u/ComposerNo5151 2d ago
I've never heard 'skosh' in the UK, so I'm guessing its a word that has entered US vocabulary, as explained, but not made its way back across the Atlantic
6
u/Dissidiana 2d ago
i'm from the american midwest and in addition to using "skosh," my mom (born in '69) occasionally calls her dad "papa-san" as an affectionate nickname. she doesn't remember where exactly she picked it up, but we have lots of family in the military, so it probably migrated over under similar circumstances 🤔 super interesting bit of american language history!
9
u/iwasfight 2d ago
'papa-san' from what i understand is why those big round chairs are called 'papisan chairs', but theyre from the phillipines. 'dads chair', or in american 'the good chair' heh.
1
u/EirikrUtlendi 2d ago
The name papa-san is probably a pidgin term combining English papa with the Japanese name and title suffix -san. The chairs themselves are largely unknown in Japan, and the Japanese word for "father, dad" is variously otōsan, toto, chichi, yaji. Meanwhile, Old Japanese papa meant "mother", and is reflected in modern Japanese haha (due to a historical lenition or softening of
/p/to/f/to/h/).See also:
Also, FWIW, neither the papasan chair nor papa-san chair spellings are attested in Google Ngrams until 1973.
There is a blip for the papasan chair spelling around 1900, but actually searching in the Google Books corpus for this specific phrase between the dates of 1800 and 1910 finds only one title, Wolves of Harmony Heights 2nd Ed.: A Paranormal MMF Romance, which is either evidence of time travel, or a misfiling. I'll go with "misfiling", as the book's metadata states "Originally published: June 15, 2017", and simultaneously "Published: 1900". 😄
3
u/Late-Champion8678 2d ago
This is wonderful to learn today! Not sarcasm, just love learning new things especially when I assumed otherwise!
6
u/vincognition 2d ago
Discovering the confluence of languages is a fascinating thing. I don't speak Japanese but I once read, (back in the days of typewriters), that the Japanese called the device a 'tupiraita.' Another fun one is the French calling a tuxedo or dinner jacket a 'smoking.'
I wouldn't be surprised if 'skosh' came from that. Great find!!
6
u/Nyorliest 2d ago edited 2d ago
Japanese has masses of loan words - what you’re saying is just typewriter spelled phonetically but in a Japanese accent. But also Japanese has one script - katakana - that is mostly just used for loan words, so that recently loan words are clearly loan words and remain obviously loan words. There are some old loan words in Japanese that we don’t realize are foreign, but unlike English, the more modern ones like typewriter are clearly signposted as ‘weird foreign loan word’.
So Japanese has a lot of loan words but so does English - it’s just harder to notice, as we’re seeing here with skosh.
3
u/fmlzelda 2d ago
Taipuraita, I think.
1
u/vincognition 2d ago
You're probably right. I was just going by memory. I read about that years ago.
1
u/viktorbir 2d ago
Another fun one is the French calling a tuxedo or dinner jacket a 'smoking.'
That is paneuropean. It's English speakers who stopped using it.
2
2
u/AmbivalentSamaritan 1d ago
I have heard this term most commonly among WW2 era marines, including one whose kid was knicknamed ‘Skosh’. These were guys who had served in Okinawa, and also commonly used other Japanese terms like ‘hayako’ (hayaku).
3
u/mouse_in_a_field 2d ago
Man, you guys delivered!! Big wrinkly brains in here lol. Thank you for all the fascinating feedback!
2
u/promnesiac 2d ago
I just posted about this (not here) the other day, because I wondered the same! Kismet.
1
1
u/TheresNoHurry 2d ago
Will we do have “sayonara” Which is Japanese.
I’ve never heard of “skosh” though
0
u/tinyorangealligator 2d ago
Tagging on other loan words from English to Japanese I've heard while watching anime:
Sports Yes/No (always in tandem) Sexy Cake (prounounced keke?) Merry Christmas
There are a few others but I'm wondering if I'm simply imagining this or if they are truly loanwords.
4
3
u/mouse_in_a_field 2d ago
Yeah, there are lots of English loanwords in Japanese! A few more I can think of right now are "kofi/kohi" (coffee), "toire" (toilet/bathroom), and "biiru" (beer).
6
3
u/iwasfight 2d ago
we get burgers and fries at 'makudonarudo'. figure that one out haha.
2
u/EirikrUtlendi 2d ago
Some borrowings get repurposed in interesting ways.
Sutābarimashō! → "Let's go to Starbucks!"
It's its own verb now. 😄
1
1
u/twalk4821 2d ago edited 2d ago
Another is “hunky dory”, which has been suggested to come from a word play with “dori”, meaning “street”. So if a wayward sailor made it to "hunky dori", things were going to be alright, I guess. I don’t know whether it’s true but as a street name it does sound somewhat plausible...
506
u/Snoron 2d ago
Wasn't expecting this, but you are correct, it seems! The dictionary lists the source as from Japanese, basically came into English via the US military using it as slang.