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So, I've looked high and low but simply cannot figure this one out.

In what I'm reading, a character says this to another who is wearing a suit:

今日もゲロシヴなスーツが決まってるねぇ

What does ゲロシヴ mean? I tried looking it up, but the best I got in the results were a few scarce articles mentioning cars and bikes. It could be a reference to Sexy Commando Gaiden, what with "げろしゃぶ", but it's not being spelled that way making me think it means something else. Plus, I'm not even sure げろしゃぶ would make a whole lot of sense used like this.

Eddie Kal
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Ver
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2 Answers2

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ゲロシブ splits into the part of ゲロ and シブ.

シブい comes from 渋み. It describes bitterness or a bit of sourness. The aesthetic nuance describes maturity, so it's actually fashionable not in a so young and fresh way. Probably it means “dandy” in this context.

ゲロ literally means “a vomit”, but it is simply used as an intensifier like “damn” cool or “badass”.

Thus the sentence explains “the suit is very dandy and it suits you” or alike.

naruto
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kimi Tanaka
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  • I was about to use the word "dandy" in my answer, too, but I forgot to mention it because I was thinking about Space Dandy while trying to find the results about bikes and cars that Ver found on Google. Apparently there are only two slots in my brain right now for multi-tasking. – wanwandrew Oct 12 '21 at 23:27
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    Is ヴ in the question a typo? Alternate spelling? – Leebo Oct 13 '21 at 00:23
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    Hey, thanks for the response! That sounds about right, but the only thing that confuses me is, wouldn't it be ゲロシブ*い*スーツ in the sentence, then? Not ゲロシブ*な*スーツ? Or is there a reason it would become a na-adjective instead? Edit: @Leebo, since the thing I'm reading is online and text-based, I just straight up copied the text. I was also confused why it uses ヴ, but the author uses some slang considered outdated in the work (even though it's only from 2000). Maybe that's it? – Ver Oct 13 '21 at 00:25
  • @Leebo alternate spelling, for sure. – wanwandrew Oct 13 '21 at 00:26
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    @Ver Slangy modifiers like ゲロ, 激【げき】, ちょい and オニ are not ordinary adverbs, and thus ゲロシブい is not usual (although not ununderstood). There is a (slangy) convention to first ["nominalize"(?) the adjective by removing い](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/q/72819/5010). In your case, シブな or シブの in isolation makes no sense, but ゲロシブな suddenly starts to make perfect sense even though I have probably not seen or heard ゲロシブ before. Similar and more common examples include 激安(な/の), 激甘(な/の), ちょい悪(な/の), ゲロマズ(な/の), バカウマ(な/の) and オニつよ(な/の). – naruto Oct 13 '21 at 00:49
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    @Ver The use of ヴ instead of ブ is just for "stylization". It's like writing "U" instead of "you" or "@" instead of "a". – naruto Oct 13 '21 at 01:02
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ゲロ = vomit シヴ = civilization ? It could mean a suit that is reminiscent of bum/dirtbag, non-conformist, dadaist, or punk (or any combination of these, for that matter) culture. This could possibly be related to what you read that involved bikes and cars in the sense of punk roughly equivocating biker or dragracer, if those are the types of bikes and cars we are talking about. lol.

wanwandrew
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