A week or two ago, I learned an interesting expression at work: 야자타임 [yajataim]. This is a slang term that means “A time when normal formalities, especially deferential language, can be temporarily suspended.”
I was excited to learn this term, because it could actually be useful with my students, in the event they are being too formal, which is sometimes an issue with certain socially awkward kids. It isn’t normally a problem if they’re speaking English, since Korean students are taught, erroneously, that English utterly lacks levels of formality. Of course English has lots of levels of formality, it’s just that we don’t use verb-endings and noun substitutions to pull it off, generally speaking. There tends to be a lot of just periphrastic substitution, e.g. “Gimme that” vs “Could you hand that to me, please?”
The etymology isn’t very clear to me on the first part of the term, but the second part -타임 [taim] is transparently the fully nativized borrowing from English, “time,” which is used in for a variety of meanings and contexts, some of which are similar to the English semantics, such as this one, and others where it has acquired new, weirdly different semantics – as in e.g. its broad use as one of the “noun counter particles” for listing the numbers of class periods at schools.
Anyway, the first part I can’t quite figure out, but I’d say the 야 [ya] is probably the vocative particle used for addressing inferiors (“Hey, you!”), which makes sense in context. As a guess, the 자 [ja] might be the verb propositive ending, i.e. “Let’s….” It all fits together neatly, in semantic terms: “Let’s [have] ‘hey you’ time,” but the grammar seems like an unholy mess.
[daily log: walking, 7km]
Day: March 5, 2017
Caveat: Quatrain #17
(Poem #217 on new numbering scheme)
"If you don't want to know the truth," he said, his grin unkind, "You must imagine everything is only in your mind."
– a quatrain in ballad meter.