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Originally Posted by Triple_R
But when people look for "Slice of Life", they're primarily looking for a show with a certain feel to it, and Tari Tari does in fact have that feel, consistently throughout the show.
So I think that some people are allowing an overabundance of pedantic thinking to get in the way of what would be most helpful in a practical way when it comes to genre classification.
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At the extreme, there are basically two choices:
1. Stick to standardized definitions and try to help people understand them so that they use them correctly. (This would be the librarian's approach, and is most useful for fixed classification.)
2. Allow word meanings to evolve to mean whatever people are using them to mean, and try to figure out the definition of what it means in that audience context. (This is what usually happens naturally when people don't care about standardization. This sort of word usage, when restricted to a specific sub-group, is "slang".)
Obviously, word usage does evolve over time, so a balance between these two ideals needs to be achieved. But classification is often used in databases to help sort and organize content. It isn't practical to keep constantly reclassifying things based on the way terms evolve in niche communities, but rather to classify according to a more-or-less fixed standard. This means you don't have to go back and reclassify other things in the past that were similar. So when you're talking about "how should people classify things", I would say that people should generally *try* to stick as close to the industry-standard definitions as possible because they have fixed meaning and are less likely to change. But this is only useful for people who are trying to use the
right term.
If you created this thread to ask for "permission" to keep on using the slang you want to use anyway, you don't need it. Do whatever you want. But don't expect to redefine what the term means broadly, because it's used in other industries that aren't going to follow anime's lead. People who aware of the industry-standard meaning will always be annoyed when people use the term incorrectly, even if it's common "slang". You may consider that being "pedantic", but meaning in a broader context is generally more important than what one small group has decided to make a word mean instead. If you want to know what genre certain anime are in based on the industry definitions, I think those have already been provided... and subsequently rejected by you.
Anyway, for your interest and consideration, AniDB has a classification system that depends on a work being tagged in multiple categories, and put together these categories create a more-or-less comprehensive picture of the sort of a show something is. To this end, they created a lot of additional categories beyond what you'd normally call genres (or sub-genres) -- because they're not genres, just categories. You may be interested in the category they created called "
Daily Life":
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Originally Posted by AniDB Definition of Daily Life category
The antics of the protagonists do not take place in some exotic setting or time, but in everyday life. When not "at the job" this means getting up in the morning, making meals, house cleaning, going shopping or out to eat, visiting the bath house or spa, leisure activities in the spare time, etc. The time "on the job" for students is School Life, for others working in their profession. Daily Life is basically a synonym for everything normal, repetitive, and trivial happening to your average person.
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I'm not saying they're either doing it correctly or not, but it's just another way of classifying things (that works around the whole "genre" issue). In the world of "inventing new terms to describe things because the existing terms have baggage that confuses people", this one at least doesn't seem bad to me. Obviously it's in use at AniDB, but whether it will catch on in regular discussion, who knows... In the case of Tari Tari, I think it communicates something entirely different from calling it a coming-of-age story or a drama, but what it communicates may still be useful to some people.