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I saw this in a tweet just a few minutes ago.


This could be talking about the world cup.

I can't find カイデー defined anywhere. What does it mean? What does that tweet say?

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2 Answers 2

up vote 6 down vote accepted

I am not fully sure, but it may be an instance of playing around with words: cut a word in half and put them together in the wrong order, which is often done especially among celebrities. In this case:

でかい → デ + カイ → カイ + デ → カイデー [Vowel lengthened to make it four-mora, which sounds more familiar and cool]

In this case, it will mean

America ... There are bunches of players around who are larger than me.

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A couple of years ago it was popular among the JK crowd to pronounce ごめん as メンゴー, so this is probably the same thing. –  Derek Schaab Jul 17 '11 at 21:39
@Derek Yes. That is another example. –  user458 Jul 17 '11 at 22:26
Or the famous まいう! –  Axioplase Jul 18 '11 at 8:17

I'm inclined to believe it's the reordering of pronunciation. English has a similar concept. It's called Pig Latin(which actually has nothing to do with Latin).

This answer might not be directly relevant to Japanese, but if the concept of reordering exists in English, it seems to make it more believable that similar phenomenon occurs in other languages.

The first onset (the consonant (cluster) that comes before a vowel) is put to the back of the word, then "ay" is added to it.

E.g. "Scram" turns into "Amscray" (Typical Pig Latin example. It was frequently used to the point where it eventually became a recognized English word)

E.g. "Bird" turns into "Irdbay"

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Reordering is indeed observed widely in other languages. It is called metathesis. scram and bird are mono-syllabic. So the first syllable is the whole word. I think you meant onset (i.e., the consonant (cluster) that comes before a vowel). –  user458 Jul 29 '11 at 18:29
Ah yes that was what I intended to mean. But I didn't have the exact term for it. I'll fix it. Thanks. –  Flaw Jul 30 '11 at 0:08

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