Mystery of 徐に: "slowly" or "suddenly"?

Question

I came across the adverb 徐に{おもむろに} , which is supposed to mean "slowly, deliberately" as in "he slowly got up from the chair".

But I have learned that a mistaken usage of the word is apparently so common it shows up as the first definition in several of my dictionaries, meaning suddenly. This mistake is apparently much more common from young people.

Digging into this more, I found an entry from 実用日本語表現辞典 that tries to make sense of this, and what it said intrigued me even more:

このような誤解が生じてしまう原因は、「おもむろに」の用法に関係している。「おもむろに」は、静止状態からなんらかの動作に移る時の様子、または一つの動作から次の動作へ移る時の様子を表す言葉である。たとえば、「彼は、会釈をしてきた。そして、おもむろに近づいてきた。」「彼は、立ち上がった。そして、おもむろにカメラをこちらに向けた。」などというふうに使われるのである。これらの場合「おもむろに」の本来の意味は、「ゆっくりと」であるのだが、前後のシチュエーションがわからなければ、「突然に」とか「いきなり」と解釈しても、意味が通じてしまう。結果、「おもむろに」の意味が取り違えられてきたのである。

Essentially, it suggests that because the original meaning of おもむろに has to do with moving from a state of rest to a movement or one movement to another, which can create ambiguities from the sentences they listed.

But this doesn't sit right with me. Taking their example:

「彼は、会釈をしてきた。そして、おもむろに近づいてきた。」

...they say that without surrounding information, you can interpret it as "suddenly" and it makes sense... What? This doesn't sound like how words work. I think in a lot of sentences omitting context, tons of adverbs of various shades of meaning can end up "making sense" or even conveying similar things. That doesn't make near every adverb get the おもむろに treatment of having two common opposite meanings.

What also confuses me about this explanation is that it seems like the only way you could make this mistake is if you take the meaning to be nothing more than "adverb for when you move from one state to another". It is really hard to see how a meaning of "slowly" being omitted so easily as it seems opposite to "suddenly".

The entry does offer one other potential connection however:

ところで、日本の古文には、「日本書紀」という歴史書がある。この書物は、漢文体で書かれている。その中に、「ゆったりと」「物静かな様子で」という意味の「おもぶるに」という語が記載されている。「おもむろに」の語源は定かではないが、この語がもととなった言葉ではないかとする説がある。

This explanation even if connected probably does not explain this mistake in total. So I guess all I can ask is how potentially this kind of mistake could have occurred considering the mistaken usage is common. I don't know how even theoretically such a different meaning could have become widespread, and again the entry was not convincing to me. I also want to know to what extent this is considered a mistake, because it seems common but is marked 誤り in most dictionaries.

Answer 1

how potentially this kind of mistake could have occurred considering the mistaken usage is common. I don't know how even theoretically such a different meaning could have become widespread

From my perspective, おもむろに is very different from either "slowly" or "suddenly" in English. Even when it's used somewhat like "suddenly", it's used only in a situation where, within one scene, someone started some small action without any contextual foreshadowing or prior indication. I feel it's (still) utterly incorrect to use it to describe a surprising type of event that started all of a sudden (e.g., 歩いているとおもむろに自転車が飛び出してきた). However, today, it almost never refers to the physical slowness of an action (e.g., 急いでいても彼はおもむろに走る), either. It may be hard to understand why the confusion has arisen without looking at many real examples.

I also want to know to what extent this is considered a mistake, because it seems common but is marked 誤り in most dictionaries.

I believe a sentence like "晴れてたのにおもむろに雨が降ってきたよ!" would be considered wrong by almost everyone. However, in reality, おもむろに is usually used in ways where no one can clearly judge whether it's used mistakenly or correctly, so this doesn't cause real arguments often.

When people are explicitly asked about its meaning, I imagine it's roughly the same extent that "ambivalent" in the sense of "indifferent" is considered a mistake. I mean, it is still widely considered a mistake by knowledgeable people, but the "misuse" is undeniably widespread today.

Whether to accept such shifts in meaning or reject them as mistakes varies from person to person, or from dictionary to dictionary. Generally speaking, novelists tend to prefer preserving the meanings that existed when they were born, but researchers are often surprisingly tolerant of these kinds of semantic changes.