This isn't a festivel. It's an "outside party".
Sometimes, you are irked by something not because there is any reason to be so, but just because you have some idiosyncratic and utterly illogical response. The use of the words "home party" to describe what is essentially a common get-together with friends at ones home in America used to really annoy me. I knew that this was a Japanese-English invention meant to explain something that was not common in their culture, but it always made me think that the Japanese believed Americans were having a grand old bash on a regular basis with their friends. The more annoying things was that I could not break students of the habit of using "home party" and replace it with the more appropriate "get together".
I don't miss students telling me that Americans have "home parties" all of the time.
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Seems like so many things get 'party' attached to them. For me, it was 'drinking party'. I mean, it's drinking... do we really need to throw the word 'party' in there, especially when these so-called drinking parties are held at izakayas/bars?
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing an example of what my Japanese wife and I call also 'Japanese English.' They can take an English word or phrase and use it in a way that both makes sense but also modifies, or even distorts, the way in which us 'native speakers' might use it.
ReplyDeleteAs it is firmly established in their own culture/perspective on the world it is not easy for them to give up using it when they are speaking English. They will persist even after it has been explained to them that it sounds odd to us native speakers.