Bitchy Revisited

Yesterday I taught one of the Japanese English teachers I work with the words "bitchy" and "pissy". Good for use among family and friends, I said. He's been having a bad time lately. The kocho sensei (principal) has been getting down on him (possibly for some things that he needs to be talked to about anyway, but you didn't hear that from *me*) and when he confided in me and wanted to find the right word to talk about how kocho sensei has been acting toward him lately, I said, Bitchy. Or pissy. Those two words just about cover it.

Now when I ask how he is he tells me today he is a little bitchy, and I say, "Boku mo bitchy da yo!" I'm bitchy too.

We laugh about this as if we're the teenagers in our classes who look up the English words for sexual anatomy or ask me if I "play sex" (it's a confusion of verbs--they learn play early to talk about the sports and games they play, but in Japanese the verb they use is just a generic "do" that is used to make just about anything a verb, even adjectives). It's great fun splicing languages together, then having students who overhear a sentence part in Japanese and part in English say, "What was that? What does that mean?" and then just looking at each other and laughing.