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Phrase: Date yourself
No, this is not the ultimate in self-love.
If you date yourself, you do or say something revealing your age.
As you already know, language is in constant flux.
What I mean is it has a life of its own.
You do not use many of the words that your parents used.
Likewise, many of the words you use are not used by your children.
If you date yourself, you do or say something, such as using outdated phrases that reveal your age.
I learned this the hard way just a few weeks ago.
I realized that I’ve been dating myself for quite a while now, almost every time I speak Japanese.
When I realized it, I was slightly embarrassed.
Hey, don’t laugh!
Show me a forty-something-year-old guy who isn’t somewhat embarrassed sometimes, and I’ll show you a liar.
At the beginning of this month (May 2019), Japan experienced an era change.
Emperor Heisei abdicated, and Emperor Reiwa ascended the throne.
This change caused a lot of people to reflect on the Heisei era.
People who live through an age not only have a plethora of shared experiences, they have a shared language.
To make a long story short, I’ve been using many Japanese terms from the early Heisei period, which are no longer in vogue.
One of them is kuuki yomenai or KY for short.
Literally, it means ‘to read the air,’ but we can translate it as ‘to read a social situation.’
Ironically this is something which I failed to do.
KY was a viral expression when I first came to Japan and one of the first things I learned.
Young people don’t use it anymore.
When someone committed a social faux pas, I would usually be the first one to say, ‘Omai KY wa!’ but I’d been dating myself for about ten years.
The joke was on me.
It seems I’m not as young as I used to be and more embarrassed than I once was.
Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test
This post is understandable by someone with at least a 7th-grade education (age 12).
On the Flesch-Kincaid reading-ease test, this post scores 77.
The easier a passage is to read, the higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100.