Taipa: Time Performance

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette. Here is a wonderful word that’s making the rounds in Japan.

It’s taipa, T-A-I-P-A.

And taipa refers to the level of satisfaction gained compared with the time spent.

And like many Japanese neologisms, it’s a shortening of other words.

Taipa comes from taimu pafomansu, which is borrowed from the English time performance.

And taipa is particularly popular among younger folks, especially those born between 1995 and 2010.

If you want optimum taipa or time performance, you might watch a film or listen to a podcast at twice the normal speed.

Or you might look for recut versions of a movie that just show the major plot points or skip to the songs that you like in a playlist.

And Grant, I certainly seek out typo when I’m listening to audiobooks.

I often turn them a little bit faster than what they should be.

Oh, really?

Yeah, I used to do that.

And I started realizing it was affecting my day-to-day conversation with people where I felt everyone was dragging around me.

I had to go back to normal speed.

Is that right?

Yeah, yeah.

But typo, what a word for the modern age where we’re just trying to cram more life into the time we’re given.

Right, right.

We’re being inundated with so much media, and so how do you speed things up so that you get through it all?

But we feel so obligated to consume the media that we’re presented with, whether it be in text or video or audio form.

We feel obligated.

I wonder why.

I wonder why we don’t just simply push it away and say, no, thank you.

It’s really like shoveling snow in a blizzard, isn’t it?

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Draining the ocean with a teaspoon.

It’s just never going to end.

I think this is why best of lists thrive.

The best of 2023 of this sort or of that sort, because you need filters.

You need people to curate quality for you so that you’re not having to sort it yourself and have to do things like watch a movie at twice the speed.

That sounds ridiculous.

Action movies are fast enough without seeing kick punches at a double speed.

I can’t imagine.

Well, we love talking about language on this show, and we often venture into things like, besides new words, we talk about slang that your kids bring home or slang you remember from your old childhood, the books that you read, the books that we read.

And we like to talk about those gentle disputes you have at work and at home about the right way to say things and the right way to write them.

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