The Japanese language, as spoken by native Japanese, has undergone a tremendous change in recent years-more noticeably in its spoken than in its written aspect. Some people brought up in the good old days deplore this, attributing it to the ignorance or negligence of decorum in speech among the younger generation. But the fact is that more and more adults are finding themselves unwittingly committing errors in usage, which they were formerly trained at school to avoid by all means. Among these deviations from linguistic norms, there are some which look likely to be established as perfectly acceptable usage, no matter whether one favors or disfavors them. Among them the most easily observable are: (1) recurrence of a rising intonation in mid-sentences, (2) omission of a morpheme, a word, or even a phrase, which was once considered indispensable in correct usage, (3) recurrence of what looks like an "empty" (semantically meaningless) word, (4) recurrence of what amounts almost to a cliche, and (5) prevalence of "feminine" (often infantile) language over strong "masculine" language, particularly in dialogs. What these phenomena reflect is, in the view of this paper-writer a kind of enervation in the verbal culture of the Japanese in general.