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karaoke

Posted: Sun Jan 13, 2013 7:34 pm
by Philip Hudson
There have been several mentions of karaoke in this forum recently. I think it should be a Good Word of the day.

The karaoke machine and karaoke bar are familiar items in the USA. World wide, they are ubiquitous. One of my dear progeny, in his salad days, made a shaky living singing at karaoke bars. The name has followed the machine. Karaoke is a good example of universally known words. I believe a phonetic attempt at saying and then spelling karaoke has invaded every numerically significant language.

In my naive youth, I though scientific words were universal so that ferrous and Fe described iron in every language. It doesn't. Chinese periodic tables do not have western nomenclature. Germans persist in calling a hydrocarbon "kohlenwasserstoff" and thumb their nose at other standard scientific words.

Leave it to a Japanese combination CD player, microphone and video display to create a universal word.

Notice the word is not entirely Japanese. It is Japanese and European. Kari means empty in Japanese. It is empty because there is no recorded lead singing voice. Oke is an abbreviated version of the Japanese word for orchestra that was directly borrowed from several European languages, including English.

I think encouraging the development and use of universal words is good. Then how about conversion to the metric system? They will have to pull my 25foot measuring tape from my cold dead hands before they do.

Re: karaoke

Posted: Mon Jan 14, 2013 12:33 am
by Perry Lassiter
Always wondered where karaoke came from.

Re: karaoke

Posted: Mon Jan 14, 2013 5:23 pm
by eberntson
It's root are in the idea that all drunk people think they can sing whether they have a key or not. :cry:

That aside it is a fascinating word and comes from Japanese I believe. :mrgreen: