オーバーシュート (Ōbāshūto)? Not Overshoot (COVID-19)

I'm generally not too fanatical about insisting that people use the exact same language as I do. But ordering people to "HEAR WHAT I MEAN!" can be confusing, and sometimes fatal.

Witness "overshoot" and COVID-19.

(This is a meta-linguistic drift in semantics, actually.)

I've been hearing the term "overshoot" on my wife's talk radio programs here in Japan quite a lot recently in the discussion of our collective response to COVID-19. Well, not exactly "overshoot", but 「オーバーシュート」(ōbāshūto).

I had initially assumed that Japanese media had picked up the term from misuse in the west, but I didn't have time to check it out until today. I'm not finding western sources, so it may be one of those completely Japanese-origin wasei eigo terms. (Or the persons responsible for the mis-coinage may be ducking for cover.)

The context is the so-called ōbāshūto occurring in countries such as Italy, where inappropriate social response has failed to curb the spread of COVID-19.

Here's what overshoot is:

In other words, if there is overshoot, there was a response which had a target, and the target has been missed in excess.

Undershoot would be missing the target in the opposite direction. Let's look at another example:

Graphic by Joel Rees and Wikimedia Commons user Krishnavedala.

Sine Integral function definition courtesy of Krishnavedala.

Reuse permitted under Creative Commons Attribution Share-alike 3.0 license.

See https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sine_integral.svg.

This is a curve often seen in electronics, where a sudden energy surge pushes the potential too high, and reactance (capacitance and inductance) in the circuitry causes decaying "ringing" oscillations above and below the target.

In terms of a virus outbreak, overshoot and undershoot would be about our response.

An example of excessive response -- overshoot -- might be use of medicine that is too strong, resulting in people dying or suffering unnecessarily.

And example of undershoot might be the failure to use enough medicine, again resulting in unnecessary death and suffering.

Undershoot in government response would be what many people are accusing Trump of doing. I'm not there, I don't know what all he has said when. All I get is second-hand news. But a lot of my friends and relatives accuse him of saying, "Don't get excited, don't go to the doc, just keep working and washing your hands, this will all be over in a few weeks."

Extreme overshoot in government response would be ordering an entire country into house-arrest, so that no one can legally go to work and produce essentials.

If I correctly understand the opinions I have been hearing on ABC (AM 1008 KHz) and MBS (AM 1179 KHz) stations, ōbāshūto is understood to be about the contagion, about the spread of the virus beyond our ability to control it, rather than about appropriateness of our response.

(I may be misunderstanding. My Japanese is not perfect, yet.)


And we can talk about wa-sei Eigo and about how the meanings of words change when they are adopted into other languages, but this one is going to cause confusion, even in Japanese. Ōbāshūto is clearly derived from overshoot, and the media here is talking about it as if the government therefore needs to clamp down even further.

Has overshoot occurred in Italy?

It may have. If so, it would be something like this:

1. Government understands that the virus is extremely contagious. So they order complete shutdown of all non-essential services and 24-hour curfew.
2. Italian people can't figure out how to stay alive if they can't leave the house at al.
3. Italian people consider cousins family, so they go over to the cousins' house for staples and information, and a drink.
4. Italian families are big, so this actually increases exposure over normal daily activities.
5. Virus spreads even faster.

If overshoot has occurred in any place, the appropriate government response is not to tighten controls recklessly. Somebody has to provide essential services, and those somebodies are just as capable of being infected as those who don't provide essential services.

The cure for overshoot is to remove the inappropriate responses.

Unfortunately, trying to decide what is appropriate response and what isn't requires us to make stronger effort to develop some agreement about what essential services are and who should perform them. This is one of the essential arguments between liberals and conservatives.

Unfortunately, the government defining these things top down is the tried-and-true way of the bad-old-days in the Soviet Union, China of a previous era, current North Korea, Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and so forth. It is precisely the approach that will produce overshoot, and if there is no correction, then there is no ringing response.

With top-down control and no feedback, overshoot just goes out of control:

Ultimately, non-governmental people, ordinary, everyday people will start figuring out what their own responses should be and that's when the overshoot and undershoot die down and the virus gets contained.

If I can offer a final thought, big industry and big society significantly increase the exposure of individuals, because essential services are provided by a small cadre of usually underpaid individuals who have to move long distances every day.

Those individuals have a very high exposure profile because of the number of people they have to serve.

Then they return home and expose the people back home.

Big cities were where plagues have traditionally been incubated, predominantly in the slums.

I'm not going to connect the dots beyond this, because I believe that people who connect the dots themselves will be more likely to act.

(I did write up a little English conversation example on the subject in my Random Eikaiwa blog, though.)

Food for thought: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Andromeda_Strain