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I've encountered this word several times already but never really knew what it meant. Then I just saw this on twitter:
タモリさん、今日服装がダンディー。
What is a ダンディー? What kind of clothes does a ダンディー wear?
Can someone explain to me how you would be able to recognize a ダンディ in a crowd of people?
As you have it in the quote, it is ダンディー. You have a typo. But since you are doing the same mistake three times, it looks like you are a little careless. It is a borrowed from the English 'dandy'. Dandy wear is gentleman clothing, typically in black. タモリさん is one of the big three male talents/commedians in Japan. He looks like this. His real name is 森田 (morita), and as I answered in one of your previous questions, he played around with his name: mori + ta => tamori.
P.S. Do you ever read anything other than twitter?
It's in Katakana, so it's a borrowed word. It's from the English language.
Have you watched some old cowboy movie where one of the badguys looks at a woman and says: "She's a dandy," and then he spits through his tobacco-stained teeth into a spittoon? Stands up and harasses her?
Think about the kind of woman the cowboy is describing in contrast to himself. She's classy, she's dressed well, she smells good, she's clean, etc.
It's a depricated (more in the US than in Britain) use of the English language, perhaps for this reason and perhaps not, I think. Anyway, it means 'classy'. In Japan, it happens to extend only to men. Japanese words are often misconstrued and departed from their borrowed context. Since the language is old, it would take some investigation to discover if dandy was originally meant to be used for men or women, and why it's only used for men now. It definitely means "classy", though.
I know what it looks like because I like fashion. It's kind of subjective, but you would definitely know it if you saw it from the right vantage point. If you stand on a high rise (at least two stories above a crowd), and you look down at the crowd, notice how men who wear black pants and white shirts stand out a little bit. They are dandy men. Many men wear brown suits, grey suits, blue suits, purple shirts, etc. They want to look different. For a dandy, black-and-white is just fine. Same thing every day? No problem. - A Dandy Man.
That's dandy thinking for you.
