Lynn Minmay
"Otaku" is a Japanese term for people with obsessive interests, including anime, manga or video games. In its original context, the term "otaku" is derived from a Japanese term for another's house or family ( "otaku"), which is also used as an honorific second-person pronoun. The modern slang form, which is distinguished from the older usage by being written only in hiragana (おたく) or katakana (オタク or, less frequently, ヲタク), or rarely in rōmaji, appeared in the 1980s. In the anime Macross, first aired in 1982, the term was used by Lynn Minmay as an honorific term. It appears to have been coined by the humorist and essayist Akio Nakamori in his 1983 series , printed in the lolicon magazine "Manga Burikko". Animators like Haruhiko Mikimoto and Shōji Kawamori used the term among themselves as an honorific second-person pronoun since the late 1970s. After its wild spread usage by other Japanese people, however, it became pejorative and increasingly offensive in the 1990s, implying that a person is socially inept. "Otaku" can be seen as being similar to the English terms "geek" or "nerd".