The modern slang form, which is distinguished from the older usage by being written in hiragana (おたく), katakana (オタク or, less frequently, ヲタク) or rarely in rōmaji, first appeared in public discourse in the 1980s, through the work of humorist and essayist Akio Nakamori. The pronoun was also used in the popular anime Macross, first aired in 1982, by the characters Hikaru Ichijyo and Lynn Minmay, who address each other as otaku until they get to know each other better. One theory posits that otaku was popularized as a pronoun by science fiction author Motoko Arai in a 1981 essay in Variety magazine, and another posits that it was popularized by fans of anime studio Gainax, some of whose founders came from Tottori Prefecture in western Japan (where otaku is commonly used). Eiji Ōtsuka posits that otaku was used because it allowed people meeting for the first time, such as at a convention, to interact from a comfortable distance. Science fiction fans were using otaku to address owners of books by the late 1960s (in a sense of "Do own this book?"). The origin of the pronoun's use among 1980s manga/anime fans is unclear. It is associated with some dialects of Western Japanese and with housewives, and is less direct and more distant than intimate pronouns, such as anata, and masculine pronouns, such as kimi and omae. In this usage, its literal translation is "you". The word can be used metaphorically, as a part of honorific speech in Japanese as a second-person pronoun. Otaku is derived from a Japanese term for another person's house or family ( お宅, otaku).