2014-08-18

Chossē

To prepare myself for the big-screen adaptation of Hot Road, Tsumugi Taku 紡木たく's legendary 1980s tale of bōsōzoku bikers and the 14-year-old girls who love them, I decided it was finally time to read the original manga. It's only four volumes long (two in bunkobon format) but it seems to go on forever, like a self-pitying sunset off the Shōnan coast.

It wasn't long before I came upon a word I didn't know: chossē (ちょっせー). It was clearly slang, and seemed kind of playfully derogatory, but what did it mean?

In this "Funky Tsūshin" column from 2007, Yasuda Akihiro 安田明洋 learns from "shun-san", the moderator of a major Hot Road fan site, that the word is roughly equivalent to torokusai, dassē (< dasai), or kakko warī (< kakkō warui), giving it a meaning somewhere around "pokey," "dumb," "lame," etc.

I wonder if it's related to chorokusai (< choroi), which has a similar meaning. Anime-related sources make this claim, but I can't find anything more scholarly.

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