Re: Expressing "-itis" in Japanese

From: Ken Yasumoto-Nicolson (ken_nicolson_at_hotmail.com)
Date: 09/28/04 

Date: 27 Sep 2004 18:44:17 -0700

"necoandjeff" <spam@schrepfer.com> wrote in message news:<se_5d.20453$QJ3.10680@newssvr21.news.prodigy.com>...
> "Bart Mathias" <bartmathias@verizon.net> wrote in message
> news:lOY5d.2394$dt2.559@trnddc09...
> > Ken Yasumoto-Nicolson wrote:
> > > How would you express in Japanese the equivalent of "PowerPoint-itis",
> > > "Talento-itis", etc, to sarcastically highlight some effect or other?
> > >
> > I don't quite seem to get the English meaning. To me, "PowerPoint-itis"
> > seems to describe someone who has to use PowerPoint for everything. But
> > I can't get anything at all for "Talento-itis," so this must be another
> > area where my English is out of date.
> >
> I think you got it right and he is referring to the notion of being addicted
> to something. Talento-itis would be someone addicted to, or preoccupied
> with, "talento" (understood in its Japanese sense of a certain species of
> geinoujin of course.)

No, it's not really addicted to, it's more a department/company made
rotten or sick by over-use of PowerPoint - 95% of the documents in a
company not in any way related to the fine one that I work for are
poorly-written (but sometimes nice to look at) PP presententations,
for example.

Talento-itis is one of my own coinings that sort of struck me this
summer when I saw a show I liked becoming even more full of talentos
than usual, and the focus of the show switching from the actual
content to the talento themselves, eventually proving fatal to show,
as it got yanked last month. Funnily enough, last year another show
by the same host (Mino Monta) also got yanked after an outbreak of
talentos, but sadly his Quiz Millionaire show shows no signs of
succumbing to its chronic dose of tarento-itis.

Ken