あけおめ

Happy New Year! Just a quick Japanese post to start 2013.

If you follow a lot of Japanese accounts on Twitter or Facebook or other social media, you've no doubt seen a sizable amount of set phrases thrown around the past couple days. One that I started hearing a lot a few years ago (though it's quite possible it was a popular expression before that and I just was unaware of it) is あけおめ.

Japanese likes to shrink, shorten, abbreviate, and compress words and crunch them into nifty little phrases (NG, anyone?). あけおめ is a shortening of one of the two standard New Year's congratulations - あけましておめでとうございます.

Incidentally, the other standard (ことしもよろしくおねがいします) is also going around as ことよろ.

Note that these are casual and probably shouldn't be proffered to one's superiors or elders.