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Chō vs sugoi
Yesterday I read another book by Yamaguchi Nakami 山口仲美: Wakamono-kotoba ni mimi wo sumaseba 若者言葉に耳をすませば, literally "If you listen to the language of young people," but more enjoyably "(Listen to the) flower people." The book alternates between free-form discussion between Yamaguchi and representative groups of youths and fogies, and fairly freewheeling elaborations on the topics arising therein.
I learned a few good old puns with which to repel and disappoint, like "atarimaeda no cracker." This is an old advertising slogan combining atarimae da ["Of course!" "What else would you expect?" etc.] and Maeda Crackers — so old it's new again, or was in 2007, according to Yamaguchi's presumably quite nerdy informants. But the single most interesting argument Yamaguchi made, to my mind, was about the evolution of chō.
Chō is an intensifier, deriving from the Sino-Japanese lexeme chō 超, "super-" (as in "Nietzschean superman"), used before adjectives (chō tanoshii, "sooo fun"), verbs (chō iku, "[I'm] sooo going"), nouns (chō uso, "sooo a lie"), adverbs (chō hayaku, "sooo early"), and who knows what-all else. Chō's big boom was in the 1980s, and it was iconic of young, female urbanites for a long time. Probably still is now, among stale comedians, the same way most people can still recognize valley girl talk.
But now, Yamaguchi argues, it is dying away, being replaced by variations on sugoi (etymologically "dreadful, awesome" but now idiomatically "awesome" and distinguished from its parent adjective by the lack of conjugation, i.e. without changing to sugoku for the adverbial form etc.) and, in particular, me(t)cha, originally Kansai dialect. She also claims that whereas chō used to be written most often in katakana (チョー), it is now more often written in kanji (超), reflecting an increased awareness of the etymology of the term. (I would be wary of this claim, though, since even if she is correct about the facts, the big difference between 1990 and 2010 in terms of representing Japanese is that today everyone has a cellphone and can introduce kanji into their written conversations effortlessly.)
She doesn't have much to base this on other than a deeply unscientific survey conducted at her own university in Saitama and a few vague claims about the state of affairs in the 1980s, so I wouldn't exactly call this an ironclad case, but I suppose it doesn't conflict with the youth culture of which I am dimly aware when it seeps around the edges of my reading material.
One thing Yamaguchi does not explore in this book, despite raising the issues individually, is the apparent contradiction in Japanese youthspeak between hyperbole and hedging. On one hand, she describes an intensifier treadmill, a tendency to take etymologically quite strong words and use them so indiscriminately that someone who'd missed the gradual evolution would find the results ridiculous: "This shoehorn is awesome!" But Yamaguchi also describes a tendency to favor and even innovate ways to make speech less direct and confrontational — for example, saying things like ikanai kei ["the not-going type"] rather than ikanai ["not going"].
So the mundane becomes epic while anything even remotely controversial gets a few layers of protection. She does talk a bit about how youthspeak has a social function in sustaining group identity, which may be related here, but on the whole she seems rather eager to reach the conclusion that young people secretly admire the speech of and yearn for approval from previous generations. I have my doubts. (Although I do not doubt that the youth of Japan are inheriting the age-old tradition of claiming to want to speak "proper" keigo [formally respectful language] but never seriously trying to learn how.)
Anyway, the book is more anecdotal than scientific, but it did make me want to read something properly researched and organized on the topic, which is a fairly high commendation in and of itself. I wonder if there's anything good about manual keigo; the only books I've ever noticed on the topic are crotchety screeds from old men more interested in complaining about the topic than examining it.
Leonardo Boiko:
Most importantly, chō is used before aniki. The result is chō awesome. One day I will write some port or variation of Anki (my SRS software of choice for Japanese study), specifically so that I can call it Chō Anki. (If Damien is reading this, feel free to steal the idea!)
A minor boss in Chrono Trigger has a quite impressive special attack: 『超破壊必殺魔法～！』 (It fails.)
Anedoctally, 超 seems alive and well in twitter.