Width Doesn't Enter Into It, Methinks

"Kabuya" means "wide boys"? In which regional dialect?

Wide girl
The Economist

Mrs Watanabe is tiptoeing back into Japan's stockmarket

Mar 26th 2009 TOKYO - "NOT trusted" is how Japan's Prime Minister Taro Aso described stockbrokers this month, before calling them kabuya, or "wide boys". And with the Tokyo stockmarket scraping 26-year-lows in mid-March before soaring 20% in the past fortnight, the reputation of equities as an investment is shoddy at best. Yet some Japanese investors are throwing caution to the wind and beginning to buy...

Kabu - ya: "share" + "the house thereof."

Ergo, "the house of the selling and buying of shares."

You know, like "yaoya" or "sobaya."

Or perhaps the prime minister just wanted to say kabu o yatte iru to -- "those who are doin' shares" -- a kind of loose-limbed, free form expression meant to be equivalent to the more formal"kabu torihiki" ("the selling and buying of shares on an exchange").

Or so I might have thought.

Now, with the authoritative pages of The Economist telling me otherwise, I must face the possibility that all is not as simple as I supposed.

As for the prime minister's assertion that those in the countryside believe that those who buy and sell shares are shady, well, given that he has heretofore been a reliable source of information and analysis on all subjects he has pontificated upon, he must know.

I defer to his authority.