An amusing article in the Taipei Times:
Premier Frank Hsieh (謝長廷) said yesterday that the term Taike (台客) should be an adjective for young Taiwanese men who possess clear and logical thinking, and who speak eloquently.
“When the noun and adjective Taike is used, usually people are calling or describing somebody who is not elegant or has bad taste in clothes and no sense of style, perhaps even in the way they talk. I hope that we can turn this upside down and make it all around,” Hsieh said.
[…]
Taike is a recent popular noun and adjective which media often have used to describe somebody who gives the impression of having bad taste in many respects, such as the way they dress, their speech and behavior.Originally, Taike was first used in 1990 in Taiwan among teenaers, but the term did not become widespread until recent years.
Stereotypical Taike dye their hair different colors, wear colorful shirts and baggy pants all the time irrespective of the occasion, talk a lot, drink too much, curse constantly, chew betel nut and speaks Mandarin with a heavy Taiwanese accent.
I first heard this term when I went on a trip to Penghu a few weeks ago with a group of Taiwanese when a couple of the girls were using it to tease one of the guys on the trip. Interestingly, despite what the article says, I only heard the term ‘tai,’ not the longer ‘taike.’ Still, the description in the article fits what I heard. According to the girls I was with, there are two basic types of ‘tai.’
First is the type who just doesn’t know/care how to dress or act: flip flops, a sloppy and vaguely bow-legged way of walking, exercise shorts, probably a betel-nut chewer. Second: the kind who thinks they know how to dress, but is tragically and comically mistaken. There may not be any exact equivalent in America, but perhaps if you meditate a little on terms like ‘redneck‘ or ‘guido‘ you may begin to get at least a kind of relativistic sense of what’s going on.
Does anyone out there have any good examples, either in words or photos?