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Old 2009-05-16, 18:48   Link #60
WanderingKnight
Gregory House
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Join Date: Jun 2006
Location: Buenos Aires, Argentina
Age: 35
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That's all well and good, but you do realize that the NEET acronym is not spelled out in japanese, right? Neither was it originally a japanese-coined term, either, right? The british have been using it - and other parts of the world, too - for the better part of the last 50 years or so.
But it has a special significance in Japanese which is entirely different from the Western one. Which is the only thing that matters when discussing the term--we're talking about the Japanese use of a term that has a special meaning in Japanese, very different from the original one. It doesn't matter where the term was originated, or its original meaning.

Which is why I said it's rather silly to dispute the usage of a Japanese word, regardless of its origin, with their natives.

(The original word doesn't even talk about young adults--it refers to people between 16 and 18).

PS: There are a lot of words like this, which always surprise students in Japanese 101 language courses. I'm trying to think about an example but I can't come up with one, but basically, there are a lot of words that were directly copied from English and then given an entirely different meaning.
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