Lmaooo my mom does this too except im not embarassed by it i think its hilarious. She made the younger dudes at her job laugh hysterically after a supervisor tried claiming they didnt complete a task that had been finished days earlier. My mom responded with "nah that been done" and she was so confused on why they were laughing. I thought she would talk like that only infront of me and my friends to be embarrasing but now im convinced she actually just heard us talk so much she started to unironically incorporate it into her speech 😂😂😂
I'm 40, black and a gamer, and we've been using a bunch of these words, unironically for decades. It's weird when it's been called Gen Alpha slang, because I don't understand how people don't understand these words.... Except for skibidi, gen alpha can have skibidi.... I am trying to bring wowzers back though.
A lot of slang is either taken from or based on black vernacular English it seems. Slay, work, period etc were all things said in the 80s by queer ballroom dancers. It's quite fascinating but also saddening to observe from an outsiders perspective.
GenXer here, I heard "yeet" all the time in high school in the 90s, referring to something like secretly spitting on someone. Fascinating video. subscribed.
Also "gleek" in 1970s to 80s central OK. As said in another reply, it is a specific type of spitting--i.e., squirted directly from sublingual/submandibular salivary gland ducts.
I met an elderly man with whom I chatted about his life story. I didn’t know his exact age, but he owned a business in the ‘50s so I could definitely think of him as “old.” As our conversation drew to a close, he invited me to dinner at his house at an undetermined future date. I liked the idea and told him, “That would be really cool.” He shook his head and said, “‘Cool.’ You young people and your slang…” I chuckled a bit and bid him goodbye, but inside I was reeling. “Cool” has been in use for, like, three generations at this point! I didn’t even think of it as slang until I met someone who PREDATED that definition of the word! Unfortunately I never got the chance to have that dinner, and he died within a couple of years after our conversation. I’ll never forget him, though; it was like the distant past had reached out and tapped me on the shoulder.
I am 90% certain I remember yeet from 2010. But I will admit it was only meant in the sense of "to throw something or otherwise launch very quickly," typically in reference to actions in a video game. I never used it as an exclamatory "expressing excitement or approval," as Wikipedia claims.
@@alexanderbrady5486That just unlocked a memory! I had a friend in middle school (90's) who used to yell "Yeet!" like that - like "Yeah!" or "Cool!". That may have been his own idiosyncratic thing though.
I was kinda surprised that you (and the other references) didn't even touch on "unalive". Arguably, it wasn't invented by Gen Alpha, but it really seems to have been embraced by them as slang in a way not done by any previous generation. As far as I know, it was actually invented by Gen Z as a sort of tongue-in-cheek reaction to de-facto online censorship of words like "die", but for quite a long time was mostly used not as a general-purpose slang word, but very deliberately in specific situations to say "I am using this word because I am forced to, which is a commentary on the state of things". Most Gen Zers wouldn't actually use "unalive" unironically in everyday conversations (which I think would be seen as a bit cringe to most of them). However, a lot of Gen Alpha seems to have heard this word so much in UA-cam videos, etc, that they have actually adopted it, entirely unironically, as a slang term which they use in their everyday lives. What used to be a social/political statement is now just another word for the next generation. So even if they didn't _invent_ the term, they have arguably invented _its use as ordinary slang,_ which I think is an interesting phenomenon in and of itself.
I think the term unalive can be traced to social media as a more...ahem... age appropriate way to say suicide, so they could keep their ad dollars. I had never heard the term until recent years, I am 28 years old, and most people explained that they used the term to avoid being flagged for inappropriate language.
Er, what? Alpha's *oldest* members just hit their freshman year of high school, are you aware of that? Gen Z's younger half absolutely uses this and the younger generation is just copying them. This is one of the major problems with this, stuff being attributed to "Alpha" because someone has seen high school kids using it for a few years now and not like... the 8-12 age bracket.
It’s only used by 20-40year olds on social media in order to avoid demonetization. It started on TikTok and spread to other platforms from there. It’s not used in any other setting so I wouldn’t classify it as slang. It’s definitely not any sort of gen alpha slang so that’s a bit weird to think it’d be included in a gen alpha slang video
Wow, I guess nobody here even bothered to read what I actually wrote. Is basic reading comprehension really that bad nowadays? I literally said *in my second sentence* that the term wasn't invented by Gen Alpha, but by Gen Z to avoid de-facto online censorship (hint: that was talking about demonetization. That's what I meant). I also already explicitly said that _the ones who originally invented it do _*_not_*_ use it as slang._ *That was part of my whole point.* But I definitely have heard quite a few Gen Alpha people using the term completely unironically as everyday slang, *unlike previous generations did.* That is the point. And yes, some people you might consider "young Gen Z" may use it too. There is no precise internationally-standardized dividing line between Gen Z and Alpha, you know. This is a cultural thing and who exactly gets put into which category is entirely a matter of opinion. The point is that the *majority* of Gen Z do not use it as slang, but Gen Alpha increasingly does, which is a difference between the two generations in general.
Gen Alpha's slang hasn't changed much at all from Gen Z slang. I bet elementary schoolers are just repeating the slang they are hearing Gen Z influencers say on TikTok
Largely yes, but I think there’s two other things happening. A) kids aren’t fully understanding what some gen z slang means and so aren’t using it quite “right,” which annoys gen z. B) Kids latch onto things they think are cool and make them their whole personality. That’s not new, but gen Alpha kids have more access to the internet than any generation before them at that age, and so they’re exposed to (and creating) content created specifically for them. I think this echo chamber is part of why Gen alpha talk the way they do.
The sigma term is a bit more complicated than explained in this video. The meme isn't, that sigma is "super alpha"; it's that the sigma is a "lone wolf", that is neither "alpha" nor "beta". The first time I came across the term, it was being used satirically, to mock the whole concept of alpha and beta males and red pill culture, but according to Wikipedia (which, I acknowledge, might not be the best source for tracking origins for different internet lingo), it originated as a serious concept by an alt-right writer in 2010. I think this highlights an interesting pattern of a kind of an irony loop where a controversial term gets shot up in popularity, by people using it both ironically and unironically and it getting increasingly difficult to tell, which is which.
maybe thats where the misunderstanding aspect comes in - for gen a they misunderstood the context they heard it in and just got that sigma is better than alpha so they use it to mean ultimate alpha.
It's strange because sigma is one of the last letters is in the Greek alphabet. I thought when they say, " What the sigma?" it literally meant "What the insignificant...."
I was around when sigma started to get popularized on a certain forum. It really comes from movie tropes. Basically, you have the Alpha, who was the strong leader. The Beta, the follower. Then some people pointed out that some characters in movies/tv shows were neither alpha nor beta. Such as villain characters, antiheros, lone wolf characters, etc. etc. So those types were determined to be Sigma. This also lead people to create even more greek letter men. such as Delta males, Omega males. etc. Here is the thing though. You will notice every following group other then Alpha males are not umm... social people and are not as negative as Beta males. That is to say, it was a bunch of terminally online guys who didn't like being categorized as Betas because they didn't hit the gym or socialize. So they started inventing their own types where they were the coolest type. Way more cool then Alpha males!
I also think it comes from toxic male culture. Being “Six Sigma” certified is a form of corporate speak that means you are better than others and meant for executive or higher levels of your business status. IMO.
I love how so much of this sounds like it could be some sort of weather report: "There's a vowel merger slowly spreading east across Pennsylvania, and GOAT has changed part of speech to past-participle, which means expect back-formations soon."
I could've sworn sigma originated from a play on alpha and beta, as a way to be adjacent and "above" the ridiculousness of the pseudo-scientific dichotomy. "They're not an alpha but they aren't a beta either. They're a sigma." The self awareness faded and sigma was lumped back into just being "better" in the same way alpha is better.
Yeah, it's another one of those shifting euphemism things, this time out of protofascist incel culture, who wanted to add something to their nomenclature where one group of incels, themselves feeling excluded from alpha-male competition, proposed there was this other group who they supposed was so cool *because* they refused to compete in the hierarchy of masculinity because they were simply too cool and apart from it's pettiness, just like sigma is all the way over in the greek alphabet, but then they just shoved sigma above alpha in that same (fictional) hierarchy, giving themselves a potential redemption arc. It seems implied that alphas win by beating the competition but a sigma wins by simply being, both by being so far apart nobody sees them and because nobody would dare challenge them. It's not just above the top, it's above *competing* for the top, which makes it doable. Like "maybe the fact that I'm so fucked up means people should fear me, maybe I am a sigma". It's a deeply messed up power fantasy.... Aaand now all that incell stuff is mainstream, great.
The first I remember seeing about “Sigma” as a classification was something similar to Alpha but not inclined towards leadership for one reason or another. Ironically Sigma as a label for a subset of people is no more or less valid than Alpha or Beta is, the concept of this hierarchy is derived from debunked studies about wolves.
Great video as always. As a black Gen-Xer, I laugh so hard when I hear all of the "new" slang . It's nice to have a linguist break down and explain the actual origins of these terms. Also love your distinction between slang and dialect. Keep up the good work. Also, getting onomatopoeia right on the first try is truly epic.
So Fun. GenX here. I was popping and locking in the 1980s. Salinas Valley CA. So NOT funny to me THEN. My Dad used to play NWA Dopeman to his HS seniors and very Compassionately and passionate his Young Ladies to not to be a Berry . Or let ANYONE run a Train " I moved to OK with some Faerie Godchildren recently and Cal he's 10 was delighted to show me his favorite UA-cam videos. Introducing me to the BRILLIANT video of Lil Nas Cant tell me Nothing. BEST historical cowboy costume in the opening scene. Oklahoma is over 20% Black and has 38 different Tribal Nations. And Black Cowboys for Trump. Definitely REAL ate the Best Shrimp Boil of my life he cooked. It's REALLY different here than the West Coast. The Weed is OFF the Chain strong and affordable. Over 400 dispensaries in OK City ALONE. And only medical. Want to keep this shit isc on the DL. Fun using some GenX slang Then I got to explain who Billy Ray Siris was. He kinda knew Miley. Then we all did the Achy Breaky Heart dance. ❤️
@@languagejones Might be interesting to do a video on UA-camse - creative alternative vocabulary used by UA-cam content creators to avoid getting their videos demonetized. e.g. un-alived in place of killed; PDF-file in place of pedophile; etc.
I'm the translator that used "sus" in an anime and upset so many people that it became trending on Twitter. Some of the audience knew "sus" was a thing long before Among Us; others thought I was mistranslating it to try to look cool. The word in Japanese was "kyodou fushin", which literally means to behave suspiciously, and the character says "kyodoru", which is the shortened (also somewhat old) slang version of the word. It's been five years and I still get people harassing me about that completely unprovoked. But also, it's interesting that a lot of the same words in different languages end up having equivalent slang words in other languages. Convergent evolution.
Even if this is sus, I choose to believe it because I think it's really funny how mad the use of "sus" in translations makes people. Reminds me of outrage in Star Rail where March says "When in Rome," as clearly that can't exist in the original mandarin! Except, the original mandarin is something like, "When in a town, follow the rules of the local magistrate," and has long been translated to "When in Rome," due to the similarity of the idioms.
@@DoctorMagoo111 lmao yeah, they have no idea how often idioms are getting translated into different, ideally similar, idioms. That one just happens to be a noticeable example because Rome, but it's _everywhere_ . It simply means nothing to a non-Japanese speaker, for example, if I say "dangos over flowers" or "don't know when the potatoes are done".
@@reimiyasaka I love matching idioms, some more examples, "going scorched earth/baby with the bathwater" vs. "burning jade and [common] stone alike" or "cutting the weeds burning the roots", "putting your foot in your moth" vs. "kicking an iron plate" "hitting a sore nerve" vs. "touching the [dragon's] reverse scale" "broken clock is right twice a day" vs. "blind cat stumbling on the dead mouse" I know a lot more but can't think of them off the top of my head....
I think it does. There’s a woman in her mid-20s who claims to have invented the word by randomly describing her eyebrows as “on-fleek” one day and posting a video of it. If she is actually the originator, then definitely not a gen alpha word. And I definitely don’t hear it anymore, so I figured it had fallen out of fashion too, but I admit I’m not exactly a representative sample.
Yeah i remember hearing this word being used in school back when vine was around. I haven't heard the word used much since, but I guess it stuck around enough to get popular with kids again.
I remember it being considered gen z slang a while back, weird to see it being called gen alpha slang (i mean im not surprised they use it too, kids copying teenagers to seem more mature makes sense). Same with yeet, lit, hype, drip, etc.
even rizz was gen z slang for a bit, but i think many of us stopped using it when younger kids started saying it. It became not cool anymore (kinda similar story with sus and among us stuff in general?)
A thesis of mine, which seems kinda obvious to me, is that less affluent strata of society who invest their mental efforts not into love for language tend to save effort in the facial muscle department and through that muscular laziness you get a dialect or tone of speaking. You can even try it out, speak with a minimum of muscle effort and listen to the result. The counterpart to that is 'posh' speech which wants to put great effort into pronunciation in order to show off superiority, or in less snobbish cases to live the love for the beauty of language and its fine details. Linguistically there is the same, usually expressed through: "As long as I am understood, what's the problem?", so people simplify speech to --save-- avoid effort. The drip example about dropping relevant words I encountered, too, and it bothers me because it's not always slang but often simply misuse that can cause confusion. For example how "hysterical laughter" dropped the laughter part and then people think "hysterical" means funny. Also one time there was miscommunication about music when someone thought that ska is punk. I had to explain that ska is Jamaican music related to reggae and that what he means is ska punk. Then there are almost amusingly confusable instances like how something being "shit" is the opposite of it being "the shit", and then add how people sometimes refer to stuff they actually like as "shit". The clickbait video title habit surely also contributes to some linguistic and mental extremisms forming. We underestimate how much such choices of conduct shape our future. Now every time someone makes a reasonable counter-argument, he UTTERLY DESTROYED the other person. It is so sighworthy. 11:34 I like "groovy" because there's actual sense behind it, well, as long as it is used only for musical appeal or its analogous effects in other areas. It refers to music that helped field slaves plow the fields, making the grooves, basically a repeating pattern of a nature that helps them just go on with the mindless task and feel good about it. The music follows a groove. Censorship might also be contributing, when people use algorithm dodge words and they become more or less codified. On the other hand, dodging censorship could probably be not nearly mainstream enough to have an impact, and the norm is that NPCs never learn which parts of their expression vanishes. Exception being the pre-social-media sphere you gave an example of with sheesh. (For frickin' Pete's sake, geez!)
I have heard it said that "yeet" is the opposite of "yoink", in that they connote the same sense of casualness, just in opposing directions (away vs. toward).
The word "yoink" could be onomatopaic related to the verb "to yank" ('yoink' is the sound you make when you yank something/someone). I first learned the verb "to yank" (I am a Dutch speaker, English is only my third language) with the meaning of "copy" or "pull in" in the context of the Linux editor sed, which has the commands yiw (yank in current word), yaw = (yank all word, includes a trailing space) and yap (yank all paragraph, includes trailing newline). I propose that we add yiw, yaw and yap to slang.
@@AmedeeVanGasse Yaw and yap are words already, and one of them already is used as slang. Yaw is one of the three degrees of freedom for a vessel, whether marine or aerial, along with pitch and roll. Yap is the sound a small dog makes, and as slang it means talking incessantly.
A lot of "Gen Z" and "Gen Alpha" slang and memes is just millenial shit from 4chan that they've seen in reposted memes, its funny how few people realize how much they've been influenced by 4chan.
@@EmilyH-u2hget jiggy with it was a will Smith song in the late 90s. And "ya dig?" for you understand is at least as old as 1970s TV, so probably way older, in AAVE.
I'm firmly in Gen Z (closer to the older end by most definitions) and almost all of these words were extremely popular with my cohort when I was in high school. Many of them only became common towards the end, but they definitely weren't created or popularised by people younger than me. Some of the ones you described as being from the 20th century or before did have a slightly different meaning to my cohort than what you described. I'm still not convinced that "cheugy" ever saw significant usage by _anyone,_ much less before millenials started writing articles about it.
Cohort is a very technical term, often used in statistics. It's for example in the name of google's ad tracking concept "FLoC", Federated Learning of Cohorts. Specifically, a cohort is defined as a group, usually of people, who share a defined characteristic.
Holy fuck, I'm early-ish millenial, and having you, a person that is referring to high school in the past tense, refer to "the 20th century" as if it were a mythical time of mystery made me feel REALLY goddamn old.
chronically online person here with some added info: 12:48 if anyone really wants to know: the term skibidi comes from a song called Dom Dom Yes Yes, originally by Biser King and later became viral due to the cover by Fiki. The line "schtibidi dom dom yes yes" is (from my understanding) just scatting, and has literally no meaning. It became popular due to a Turkish man dancing along to it, where it stayed popular for a little while. After a while Alexey Gerasimo (a russian animator) made an animation of a video game character's head coming out of a toilet and singing the song, which went viral among Gen Alpha on scrolling apps like tik tok and youtube shorts. Gen Z and millennials found out about "Skibidi Toilet" (as it was affectionately titled) with basically no context (not that there was much to begin with) and found it hilarious because it seemed like the first piece of media that was made for Gen Alpha and not Gen Z, and made all of the 16-22 year olds feel old. From there people started ironically using the term "Skibidi" i think as just a nonesense word. Skibidi Toilet was so popular and it meant absolutely nothing that i think just mentioning it was humorous to the point where people would replace any adjective with skibidi for no reason, i.e, "Thats so skibidi" or "screw my skibidi life." It literally does not mean anything, to anyone, for any reason. 18:40 while sheesh has been around for a long time, theres been a resurgence due to the "sheesh" memes. its old and dead by now but it was a meme where someone said sheesh in a funny high pitched voice and pointed to their arms (i think to point out the "ice in their veins"). So sheesh has been around for a long time, but it recently has a new reference that might add more context to the usage. 19:47 Similar to sheesh, sus has been around for a long time, but was rejuvenated with the Among Us craze during the covid pandemic. Among Us is a mafia-type game where there are imposters trying to kill other players, and since you were often typing or in heated debates, it was a lot easier to say sus rather than suspicious, and since so many people were saying it, I think its safe to say it regained popularity. It also has a double-meaning where people often use it to call someone gay? which im not sure if that was a common usage of it before Gen Z. Usually someone would call someone "sus" if they make a gay joke or do something somewhat gay, and not just as a straight up insult or slur. 20:03 I think it should be noted that I (as a member of Gen Z) have only usually ever heard this in sexual contexts, so maybe beware if you want to use this one in front of your kids or younger family. (someone correct me if im wrong here but i havent heard it used in many other contexts) 20:24 as far as im concerned, "yeet" came from a vine where someone threw something into a crowd and yelled "yeet!" If that isnt the origin of the phrase, it's definitely where it was popularized among Gen Z, as it went pretty viral. I distinctly remember a lot of people yelling yeet when they threw things in middle school.
Never seen "sus" in context of calling something gay. Only seen it when a commenter hints that an art, picture, thumbnail or short video comes from a "lewd" source. "That profile pic is sus..." and so on.
@@r.d.6290 You'd be surprised. It's very often used for that. Almost like a group of boys going "AYOO" when they see or say a homoerotic thing. It functions almost exactly like an "AYOO" moment. But is also is just in reference to sexually lewd or innuendo like behavior. Just conveniently applied to homoerotic behavior.
@@innitbruv-lascocomics9910 i first saw sus on tiktok comments in 2020 and it was almost always used cruelly to indirectly call people gay. It took a bit before i realised it had a much broader usage.
@@roboterson How is this even a connection that one would have to make? That's like making the connection between the song "Thrift Shop" by Macklemore and... thrift shops.
@@-47- Macklemore's Thrift Shop didn't originate the use of the term "thrift shop". The difference is Eminem's "Stan" invented the use of the term "stan" to refer to an obsessive, unhinged fan, as opposed to as a person's name. We can't normally trace slang term back to a single specific known originating use.
I like your suggestion of doing old slang! I might also suggest flapper slang as a source. "Flappers" were an aesthetic group of ladies in the 1920s. Some of their slang fell out of fashion (e.g. using "blouse" as a verb meaning "to leave"), some stuck around as colloquialisms ("daddy-o, cat's meow"), and some settled into the mainstream and we forgot it was slang (snuggle, dapper). Pretty interesting era, linguistically-speaking!
@@johncribbs8382 Yep. Slang usually comes out of youth cultures. In seeking self-identity, young people try hard to seem different from "those stodgy old guys." Novel forms of speaking are one way of doing it, and an appealing turn of phrase has a way of catching on.
Car guys have been using the term sleeper for years. A car being a "total sleeper" would mean it looks slow but is actually fast, especially when discussing drag racing.
Sleeper was also a term used during the cold war era to signify russian secret agents living among american population. "Sleeper agents" as they were called, usually lived in small communities and were taught to speak perfect american english. It is unknown how many sleeper agents existed in USA during the cold war period, but it is certain that this was more likely used to discredit and destroy the reputation of a US citizen that acted in some way against the system. Being called a sleeper agent was a big deal when communism was seen as a disease and literal witch hunts were done against people suspected of communist activities. I think that the slang for cars being sleepers is a direct lift from "sleeper agents" which were supposed to look and act like normal US citizens but were in fact russian spies.
@@vanzwho854the PC world definitely took it from cars, but yeah the meaning is the same. Something an opponent or critic might mistakenly "sleep on", so not give much thought to.
@languagejones, Gucci has been around since at least 1993 where it was being used in the military; “Gucci kit” was the term for “high quality equipment”.
love the video but i was born in the middle of gen z and nobody i know coast to coast my age has ever heard of anyone using "cheugy" literally no idea where people get that from, we've been confused about this for years
Yeah the only people I've heard using it in conversation were millennials, but it was the first time I had heard of the word, and I've only ever seen it used online since.
Love this video! I used to be obsessed with slang but the way it is now doesn’t feel as creative. I really love your breakdown, thank u sir, u got a new sub.
Consider me one more person who wants the Middle English pet peeve video!! I always cringe when people say “thou doth” or “he hast,” or when they add “-eth” to things that aren’t even verbs lmao
It all started with "ye olde" and has been downhill ever since... Is what I *would* say if it wasn't even older. You see, "went" is the past tense of a mostly obsolete verb called "wend"- now found only in the phrase "wend one's way". The original past tense of "go" was "yeed" (which my spellcheck is very annoyingly autocorrecting). But after "yeed" had mostly died out, poets like Spencer mistook it for an infinitive, so they invented "yeeded". We also get "holier than thou" (although that might be accurate since Romeo says "For thou, fair maid, art far more fair than she"). "Powers that be" *is* accurate. It comes from Tyndall's translation of the bible.
@@zephlodwick1009 I had been led to believe (by some other linguistic vid on youtube - possibly RobWords?) that 'the' was originally written in English with a letter which didn't exist in the German typeset that they began setting bibles in, so they settled on using the 'y' as an alternative, so when you saw the word 'ye' everyone reading just knew, at the time, that it was pronounced 'the'.
If I remember correctly, Sus made it's return back when the game "Amoung Us" went viral, instead of pronouncing the whole word "suspicious", gamers abbreviated the word as gamers often do.
Yes, and the otherwise non-gaming streamers and youtubers who played among us continued the practise, meaning that a lot of young people got the shortened form from their media consumption during covid.
@@MrShermosince when is it a slur? I thought it was still just a rather harsh insult applicable to pretty much anyone, did someone pin it to a specific group at some point?
@@Drazard >.> "Oldmate" is probably a lot older than you, Drazard, so they use the word as it was used when they learned the meaning, which is more in-line with the definition and a completely correct usage of the term. What the word means and how it is used, however, are different in modern language. A slur is just an insinuation, innuendo, or allegation that is meant to insult them or damage their reputation... however the term slur seems like it was muddled/focused on the Ethic Slur pejoratives and then became a word used to describe pejoratives generally aimed at a group of people. NPC is a slur, because it is insinuating that the person is... not a person, they're a Non-Player Character devoid of choice, thought, and autonomy.
Your mention of the newish word ‘cheugy’ and its uncertain origin sparcked a few semi-retired brain cells. There is a similar sounding word that is much used in Thai, a word that I have often heard and occasionally used for more than half a century. เชย ( choeuy ) means out-dated, out-moded, contemptibly ordinary, damnably quotidian, perversely unstimulating. The word is also used to describe a null feeling about or substantial non-reaction to people, things, processes, etcetera which might be soporifically categorized as ‘choeuy.’ It might be a stretch, but if there were to be another borrowing from Thai, เชย ( choeuy ) would be a very useful addition. The only non-noun Thai expression that I have frequently encountered among English speakers is นิดหน่อย (nit-noi), which means small-small.
This is a very enlightening video, and I think most of what you said is spot on, but there's one note I'd like to make. "Tea" is more of a play with words than a misspelling. In gay culture it is intentionally invoking the practice of old ladies meeting in a living room to have tea and gossip about their peers. They're spilling the truth while having tea. That's why it's intentionally spelled that way. On a related note, I think it's impressive how black culture and gay culture pretty much invent 90% of the influential slang in English. It's not that dissimilar here in Brazil (though it's not necessarily black, rather just the poorer communities and again, gay culture), so I think there might be something to it -- be a minority, create your sociolect, people find it cool, then it spreads. The only slang from straight people that ever caught on in my short millennial life here was "top" for something that is "top notch" or "top of the leaderboard." Everything else is gay or favela.
Honestly most “gen alpha” slang lists are full of slang us Gen Zer’s were using but I guess adults never caught it until Gen Alpha started parroting it.
@@merrytunes8697 definitely tied to rap's popularity too. Jit has been used around Florida to mean someone young, and I've been seeing it more and more often as Florida rappers gained popularity in the mainstream the past 10 years.
@@merrytunes8697 yup, and when black people are using is it's wrong, but as soon as white newscaster pick up on it 5,10, or 20 years later is "all good" lol
@HannibalKing-e7eyup. Most of their slang is gen z out of context lol. 😂 sometimes I think I know what they mean but they change the meaning just because
Most people butcher the terms and use them for pop culture demographics, not entire generati0ons. This count gave Gen X ten years and Y about twelve, LOL. In other words, they have never been about generations.
Another 1 for extra is to my knowledge only a journalism term but since the 19th century an EXTRA[EXTEA EXTRA READ ALL ABOUT IT] refers to a breaking news story that is usually printed relatively quickly after the story breaks. When it comes to an EXTRA in the news, it is usually reported on and reprinted several times as the story gets updated.
man I still don't like hearing "mid" as just another way to say "bad", to me it's still a notch above "bad". Like it's still competently made but doesn't exceed into anything special or I guess "good". edit: I appreciate the insight in the replies I keep getting btw :J
Maybe? I always interpreted it as referring to the act of "spilling the tea", in which something contained is released all over (and cannot be recontained). I don't think any interpretation is incompatible with either of the others.
I had assumed that too but I had previously researched the term after finding out about its use in Polari and realised that one of the theories is that it has a double meaning as 'T' for Truth and the fun word play of spilling tea.
Few things. I believe sus is a form of convergent evolution between the origination of what you mentioned and a shortening of suspicious during the height of the Amongus era in the pandemic. Yeet was popularized by a 2014 Vine where the first usage was some dude throwing a CD.
“SUS” comes from the video game “Among Us”. Which became popular during the pandemic. Suspicious about who is the traitor. It’s just short term for chatting in that game and became adapted to vocal speech. IMO
Nope, just no. Here in Australia we have been referring to things or people that we don't quite trust as "sus" for at least 30 years... "Need to get more milk. I chucked the one from the fridge, it was a bit sus." "Watch out for that dude, he's a bit sus."
@@machematix Interesting. Plus with the shifted vowels in NZ English, you'd get something that would be somewhat close to how I would pronounce "wretched" in western Pennsylvania.
I remember when people started describing an arrogant person as being "clout," not having heard this word before, I looked up the definition and become even more confused. Every time I heard another person using it in that wrong context, I rolled my eyes at their trendiness.
Funny. I'm completely unsurprised that it's short for fanatic. Kind of seemed like an obvious connection. "Look at these crazy young people, they're fanatics. It's just a boy band." "Aww, don't say that, John. They're just having fun. And I hear they like to be called fans, not fanatics." "Fans? Youth and their ridiculous slang..."
It's ridiculous that you can find this kind of enlightenment by accident free of charge. I didn't even know I wanted to learn about this, but I really enjoyed learning from you. Well done sir.
i feel like a majority of the gen alpha list was stuff i and other gen-Zers were saying as teenagers as well. it’s for sure slang that gen alpha is also using, but mainstream gen Z used most of it as well (in addition to the actual original uses). outside of like mewing, skibidi, rizz, fanum tax, eating, sigma, and delulu (and cheugy but i don’t think anyone actually uses that outside of some millennials on tiktok) i was using basically all of these as a teen from my recollection, and quite a few were being used by my millennial sibling years before me. also i believe “sheesh!” in this case is specifically referring to the usage associate with the “ice in my veins” pose? not a new word but a slightly different usage i think? but still like exasperated/amazed
Honestly this video was kind of a farce. “Here’s all the gen alpha slang” Guess what, gen alpha is just using slang that they’ve heard. Dunking on them by saying “you didn’t make this up” is stupid. Who cares who made it up. This languagejones guy is cooked.
What you said about people mistakenly thinking an old slang term is new reminds me of a conversation I had with a fellow Gen Xer in the 1990s at the University of Minnesota. Bear in mind that I grew up near Washington, D.C., and he grew up in rural Minnesota. I described someone I didn't respect as a "schmuck." He replied, "I love that word! It's the perfect combination of 'shit' and 'fuck'!" I was surprised to hear this and it turned out he thought it was a term recently invented by Gen X. I told him that it is a very old term and comes from Yiddish, not a portmanteau of Anglo-Saxon vulgarisms. He said he thought it was new because he heard it from students who came "from big cities out east." I asked if those big cities were ones with large Jewish populations and he said, "Yeah, I guess they are." I then asked if he'd heard professors using the word "schmuck" and he said he had, but he'd assumed they'd learned it from students. I had to give him some credit, though. There's not much Yiddish spoken in rural Minnesota, so it's easy to understand that he hadn't heard "schmuck" until he got to the university. And to his credit, he correctly determined the meaning "contemptible person" from context clues. And although his hypothesis about the etymology was wrong, it was plausible.
OMG, this reminds me of a time my husband cocked his head at me inquiringly and said "keshka?" Turned out he thought it was a Yiddish phrase because he'd heard a Jewish friend of our say "Qu'est-ce que?" - which is like the most Maine thing ever.
Sleeper has also been a racing term for, basically a Ferrari F40 in a beat-up Ford Pinto for at least 3 decades. When the car looks like it ain't shit but it burns out everything at the track. Sleeper has also been termed to electronics like games and computers that look like cheap junk and has a $10 000 set of hardware under the hood.
17:22 in Cantonese/Chinese there is 低調, which literally means "low-key", and it means to conduct oneself/ do something in a inconspicuous manner, or in a way that doesn't attract extra attention. And yes the antonym of that is 高調 which literally means "high-key"
If I recall correctly, cheugy came from mexican slang in the 2000s maybe earlier. There was a huge debate over this last year when a resurgence of started and around the time Pokemon Scarlet and Violet used it in the English localization in 2022, a game that had been in development since before gen z where teenagers. They absolutely did not create it, but if I'm wrong then I'd love to know where I can reliably search things about etymology and lexicography. I want to see more videos like this! I love language and its history and this was really informative, thank you!
Same. It's like knockoff Gucci where the label is spelled wrong, CCUGI, and someone heard it and spelled it phonetically. They try real hard to look impressive but missed the mark.
As a Gen X, I find most of these ridiculous, but the word "Yeet" is one we've been needing. It has an emotional context that "throw", "chuck" and "hurl" are just lacking.
it's also worth mentioning that 'Looksmaxxing' was biggest in online incel communities before it became mainstream. In an incel context, "-maxxing" as a suffix describes things you do to maximize your chances of having sex with a woman, usually as a way to compensate for some other inherent flaw. "Mogging" is also an incel word from the acronym "Male Of Group", meaning to be overshadowed by a more dominant man, usually a Chad, another incel term. The same thing happened with "-pilling", describing accepting a certain political ideology, usually a radicalizing one, though I don't think that's common outside of online gen z/millenial political spaces. Mewing wasn't invented for incels but it gained most of its traction there before escaping containment. (I'm pretty sure the fandom/politics phrase 'escaping containment' is going to become mainstream here in a few years as well.) having been tracking right-wing and incel culture for almost a decade now, it's incredibly jarring to hear kids using the same words, even if they don't know about the hateful ideology behind it. i've seen this happen with a few other far-right words/memes in the last decade and it'd be fascinating to watch if it weren't also terrifying.
@@baporwabe2241 I really debated how far to go down that rabbit hole and decided it was best for another stand alone video. I also need to add “based”!
@@mileslima8114 hi! most of this is from lived experience so I don't have any super in-depth resources i've personally used recently. But I'll try! Content warning for antisemitism, misogyny, and violent bigotry. I tried to make these as accessible as possible to beginners but it's still very upsetting to read. Contrapoints' video 'Incels' is a good explainer of the basics of incel ideology. Moonshot's 'Incels: A Guide to Symbols and Terminology' is super in-depth on terminology, history, and origins, and there are a lot of good jumping-off points for finding other rabbitholes to go down. It's also very dense. The ISD explainer 'Memes & the Extreme Right-Wing' also explains far-right icons that have entered the mainstream and has several links to other related articles. I can't hyperlink but I tried to use the most Google-friendly titles I could. Let me know if you have any issues with finding these!
I have a white co-worker that thought only nice looking cars were "Whips" (via the context clues). I had to tell him All Cars are "Whips" but ugly cars are also known as "Hoopties"
vibing has also been used by jazz musicians in a negative way. when you're making fun of someone, mocking their talents as a musician, taking the piss, that kinda thing, that's "vibing" somebody
if you're "vibing" that's like you're "chilling (out)" which depending on the person might imply getting high. That's less on the word and more on circumstances, though.
I thought "It's giving" was simply erasing the implicit "vibes" after the adjective. Like, "It's giving creepy vibes" becomes "It's giving creepy" or "It's giving poor vibes" becomes "It's giving poor"
@@RobBulmahn it's just grammatically incorrect, it should be shortened to "giving creepy vibes" or "creepy vibes..", you remove the fluff words that can be easily inferred by context, not the stuff that actually matters!
I'm a Millennial who went back to college recently, and one of my classmates was astounded that I could use "gen alpha slang" even though... it's literally a side-effect of me being terminally online and the fact that so few of these words were new to me. She lost her mind when I said our lab group should just finish up and "gtfo" as if we hadn't been shortening words to text them on god awful cell phone keyboards back in the day. That slang is older than her, but she was surprised I was using it. Idk, I just felt baffled. I'm glad this video existed, which sort of helped me understand why it didn't feel like new slang. Because a lot of ot wasn't, or it was natural evolutions of things I already use so I didn't have a elarning curve for it.
Maybe... But I'd bet it is actually more about a shared omomotopoetical origin for both. IIRC, "yeeted" was made up on the fly by a celebrity in the context of a video game, and took off because it just works and fills a mostly empty semantic hole created by video game physics ;)
@@travcollierI thought yeet came from two vines where people where dancing saying ya yeet ya yeet then a short time later someone threw a water bottle in a crowded hallway and yelled yeet
@@BC-sn8im Maybe. The popularization I was exposed to was gaming related. There's often a bit of difference between what brought a work into (or back into) consciousness and usefulness that keeps it sticking around.
ChatGPT (o1-Preview) Thought for 8 seconds about the Pennsylvania vowel-merger question: Identifying vowel merger I’m piecing together the specific vowel merger migrating eastward across Pennsylvania, with younger generations no longer distinguishing between two vowels that their parents did. Assessing vowel mergers I’m figuring out vowel mergers in Pennsylvania. The cot-caught merger is advancing eastward. Probable mergers include don-dawn and on-awn. Weighing various mergers I’m piecing together the 'caught-cot' merger in Western Pennsylvania, noting its shift eastward. The 'salary-celery' merger seems implausible, while the 'short o' and 'long o' merger, and the 'hoarse-horse' merger in American English appear unlikely. Yes, the linguist is likely referring to the "cot-caught" merger, a phonological phenomenon where the vowels in words like "cot" and "caught" are pronounced the same. This merger involves the collapse of the low back vowels /ɑ/ (as in "cot") and /ɔ/ (as in "caught") into a single vowel sound. In many traditional dialects of English spoken by older generations in Pennsylvania, these vowels are distinct. However, younger speakers are increasingly pronouncing them the same way. This change is spreading eastward across the state, meaning that areas which previously maintained a distinction between these vowels are now experiencing the merger among the younger population. Why is this happening? Language Change Over Time: Languages naturally evolve, and vowel sounds are particularly susceptible to change. Influence of Media and Mobility: Increased exposure to different dialects through media and greater geographic mobility can accelerate such changes. Social Identity: Younger speakers may adopt speech patterns that align with broader regional or national norms, sometimes moving away from traditional local pronunciations. Implications: Generational Differences: Parents and their children might pronounce words differently, leading to misunderstandings or perceptions of "incorrect" pronunciation. Dialect Leveling: This merger contributes to the reduction of regional dialect differences, leading to a more homogenized American English pronunciation. Example Words Affected: "Cot" and "Caught" "Don" and "Dawn" "Stock" and "Stalk" Reference in Linguistics: Low Back Merger: This phenomenon is well-documented in sociolinguistics as the low back merger or the cot-caught merger. Studies and Surveys: Linguistic surveys like the Atlas of North American English have mapped the spread of this merger across different regions. Conclusion: The vowel merger spreading east across Pennsylvania is the cot-caught merger, leading to younger speakers not differentiating between vowels that their parents do distinguish.
I assume you're talking about the figurative "out of.pocket" meaning the money you had in your pocket is no longer there, like "I paid for it out of my own pocket," versus the use in business English, meaning unavailable. God only knows what "out of office" did to make them leave. Anyway, I have an auto-reply email from 18 years ago with that phrase, so it's at least that old. I'm new to the channel, and maybe it's been done already, but I'd be very interested in some material on business English.
@@Skinsoot , I didn't know that was being used in business anywhere. I think if people are saying that it is because they picked it up elsewhere. Where I work, it is still out of office. Maybe that's partly because then we can write OOO.
Yeah, this one's weird to me when I hear it. I always knew "out of pocket" to mean "not available." I get that automatic sense of wrongness when I hear it used now. Guess some Gen A heard their parents say it so much they decided to try it on for size. LOL
*pushes up glasses* Feels weird to be trying out an um actually on my first viewing of your channel, but NPC is NOT a video game term. Originates with tabletop roleplaying in the 1970s. Anyway, New Subscriber!
Npc is definitely a video game term also. While it may have been invented earlier, it's use is applied in the same way in video games. And video games are just digital role playing games. Lol
@@about99ninjas56 You're right. That was by design. Many video game developers from the 70s to today have been inspired by tabletop RPGs and adapted those game systems into video games. It was and still is one of the easiest ways to get into coding. That's why VG RPGs are such a staple and have been since the industry started. So many of the same terms used in TTRPGs made their way into VGRPGs.
It's also literally from Video Games. Most likely because in both tabletop games and video games, it's literally the same concept; a "Non-Playable Character". This is like claiming "Pong is actually not a vdeo game. It's a tabletop game."
I definitely misspoke here. I didn't mean to imply that the term isn't in use in video games. Of course it is. I meant that its origin is in tabletop, that's all.
Not quite sure how you do it but I always find your videos so entertaining while also feeling like I'm actually learning something. I think my brain just likes how distilled the information you provide is.
small correction. Yeet didn’t exactly spawn from videogames but actually a viral video from vine where a woman was holding a soda can, launches it at a high school crowd in a hallway, and shouts “yeet!” as a random onomatopoeia. It was funny and viral and is the reason yeet means to chuck or throw something. Other than that, great video
I came here to say this. People started referencing the vine whenever they threw things, by shouting yeet just like the woman in the video. I'd label it as an interjection rather than an onomatopoeia, at least when it was first popularized.
Here's some fake gen α slang using the remixed-older-phrases formula. Bonus challenge: guess the etymology before reading the full definition: 1. Straw: "Netflix cancelling the only sitcom I even bother watching is fully straw." Adj. meaning frustrating, pushing beyond a limit. 2. Otters: "That album that charli xcx just dropped is straight otters." Adj. meaning exceptional, impressive. 3. Under (V): "I was undering the algorithm by splicing emojis into the spicier words." V. meaning to navigate undetected. 4. Kafufu (N): "Whatever Language Jones was saying about reduplication was a big kafufu to me." N. meaning something incomprehensible. ETYMOLOGIES: 1. From the idiom "The last straw" (from the earlier idiom "the straw that broke the camel's back") 2. From the earlier slang "outta sight" 3. From the phrase "flying under the radar" 4. From the word "confusing"
I find it interesting how the slang used in the early-mid 2010’s (yeet, on fleek, glow up, bussin) have specific associated videos/media to go along with them, whereas most of the new or revived slang has very little in terms of a popularized usage. Just think it speaks to the fleeting impact of “virality”
As a southern US resident, I like the enhancement of 'finna' that indicates you aren't just fixing to do something, but you're fixing to go somewhere. "Finnago," as in "I'm finnago Kroger's, ya'll need anything?" And we've been saying that for over a century, I'm pretty sure. Finnago falls only just short in my admiration to the southernism of "fersee" as a measure of distance (to go as far- or 'fer'- as one can see from this point). Used in the southern Appalachians to indicate the next ridge over. Two fersees is the next ridge and then one more. Half a fersee is the valley between here and the ridge.
@HannibalKing-e7e Both cultures use it and it comes from common origins. Neither took it from the other, and neither owns it. Language and dialect can be shared.
Iirc this comes from Scottish dialects of English, which ended up shared with black English in the south due to class commonalities. I might be wrong about that, but I recall this having roots in English dialects pre-America.
@@peterlarson233 Yeah, there's a lot of crossover between "Celtic Fringe" and African American speech patterns. Not identical, but enough common roots to see similar patterns in many cases.
I was talking to my husband about a song and said, "the young people might call it a Bop, isn't it crazy that old-timey word is being used again?" He said, "Bop? I've never heard that word being used to describe a song, it's old slang AND new slang?" He is 53 (Gen X). I am 39 (Millennial). I may have only known it was a slang word from the 30's or 40's because I've been a musician most my life. He skipped knowing the word when it was used in past decades, and hasn't heard it yet in today's time.
As a teacher, you missed some of the most popular ones: "Cook", "Cooked", "Yapper/Yapping" "Left no Crumbs", "Zesty", "Lock in", "Brain Rot", "On God", "Bro" (degendered version).
On god makes me cringe. I kind of like cooked and have started using that as well. Also your name is principal skinner and I've been watching Unlimited Steam as background noise while I sleep for like the last month, which are two totally unrelated things and you may not even know what im talking about, but its good to see you... Skinman. (Ps: in my mid 30s for context)
~20:38 I believe the origin of the word "yeet" as an onomatopoeia for throwing something originated in a vine of someone throwing a CD, and was popularized a bit later by another vine where someone is given an empty soda can and says "This bitch empty, YEET!" while throwing it - that vine is certainly where I picked it up.
I made a comment already, but I think the true origin comes from a foreign knock-off Land Before Time cartoon that became a very popular meme at the time, and one of the characters making a weird little noise in their dialog that people thought was hilarious, so they started imitating it.
@@vectorwolf Oh yeah I remember that video lol, not sure if it can definitively be tied to the use of yeet while throwing things though, seems like it might be a coincidence.
@@vectorwolf The "yeeeee" meme? Feels unlikely, since it doesn't sound a lot like yeet in practice. Then again, everyone seems to think tony soprano says 'gabagool' when I absolutely 100% can't hear any L at the end (just gabagoo).
This is quickly becoming my favorite channel atm, I love the way you break down language and I have BEEN saying that most of what people call "gen alpha slang" predates them by a lot its very validating to hear that from such an articulate and understanding person, honestly it makes me wish more people thought like you did about not only language but other things in general Im glad to see someone who is so genuinely mindful and thoughtful about such overlooked subjects
"Skibidi Bop" is a lyric from "Just a Gigalo" by Van Halen, and probably from scat singing well before that, so it's not a novel word either. Just refreshed. Great video!
@@deddrz2549 The main cultural touchstone for Skibbidy seems to be a show called Skibbidy Toilet. I don't know if that's the origin, but it seems to be the populariser.
The window-yeeting of Prague.
A fellow defenestration-knower 🫡
I came here to say oh you mean defenestration?@@lucasw158
isn't that general school curriculum or are murican schools just mid? 😜
@@fariesz6786 I think mid would be giving American schools way too much credit.
we should start saying yeet again i think it was a funny word
I'm 40, parent of a gen z son. I learned all of his slang to embarrass him in front of his friends. No cap. On God.
😂 🙌
My daughter hates when I do this
Lmaooo my mom does this too except im not embarassed by it i think its hilarious. She made the younger dudes at her job laugh hysterically after a supervisor tried claiming they didnt complete a task that had been finished days earlier. My mom responded with "nah that been done" and she was so confused on why they were laughing. I thought she would talk like that only infront of me and my friends to be embarrasing but now im convinced she actually just heard us talk so much she started to unironically incorporate it into her speech 😂😂😂
LEGEND
All parents do this. You may as well tell us you tell dad jokes.
“Dish” becoming “Snack” because of inflation tho 🤣 😅
LMAOOOOOOO
Shrinkflation at its best!
2 bucks for a vend
this made me laff out loud fr. 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
(also recently learned "absolute unit" or "snack/snacc" is actually aussie, originated there. TIL.)
He had a few good ones like that, I appreciate his dry delivery.
I'm 40, black and a gamer, and we've been using a bunch of these words, unironically for decades. It's weird when it's been called Gen Alpha slang, because I don't understand how people don't understand these words.... Except for skibidi, gen alpha can have skibidi.... I am trying to bring wowzers back though.
What about rizz
@@pxolqopt3597I'm also 40 and rizz has been around for a minute. Just wasn't used that often.
Yea, most of these are words I’ve been using since I was a kid.
A lot of slang is either taken from or based on black vernacular English it seems. Slay, work, period etc were all things said in the 80s by queer ballroom dancers. It's quite fascinating but also saddening to observe from an outsiders perspective.
I'm all for bringing wowzers back 👍
GenXer here, I heard "yeet" all the time in high school in the 90s, referring to something like secretly spitting on someone. Fascinating video. subscribed.
In my neck of the woods, it was 'gleek.'
Yes your thinking of gleek which is when you squirt saliva out of young saliva gland intentionally
It was gleek here too
My son went thru this phase, for some reason this word makes me irrationally angry 😂
Also "gleek" in 1970s to 80s central OK. As said in another reply, it is a specific type of spitting--i.e., squirted directly from sublingual/submandibular salivary gland ducts.
I met an elderly man with whom I chatted about his life story. I didn’t know his exact age, but he owned a business in the ‘50s so I could definitely think of him as “old.” As our conversation drew to a close, he invited me to dinner at his house at an undetermined future date. I liked the idea and told him, “That would be really cool.” He shook his head and said, “‘Cool.’ You young people and your slang…”
I chuckled a bit and bid him goodbye, but inside I was reeling. “Cool” has been in use for, like, three generations at this point! I didn’t even think of it as slang until I met someone who PREDATED that definition of the word! Unfortunately I never got the chance to have that dinner, and he died within a couple of years after our conversation. I’ll never forget him, though; it was like the distant past had reached out and tapped me on the shoulder.
cool story bro
He was probably being sarcastic.
You should have said "that would be the cat's pajamas."
@@NJGuy1973 or "the bee's knees."
I'm sitting in the catbird's seat!
We were yeeting in 2015/16, I don't think gen alpha can have that one
They yeeted out of the womb
I am 90% certain I remember yeet from 2010. But I will admit it was only meant in the sense of "to throw something or otherwise launch very quickly," typically in reference to actions in a video game. I never used it as an exclamatory "expressing excitement or approval," as Wikipedia claims.
yup, it's been around since 2014 and came from vine
@@Finimabob "this bitch empty, YEEET" is the first time I saw it, but surely it predates the vines lol
@@alexanderbrady5486That just unlocked a memory! I had a friend in middle school (90's) who used to yell "Yeet!" like that - like "Yeah!" or "Cool!". That may have been his own idiosyncratic thing though.
I was kinda surprised that you (and the other references) didn't even touch on "unalive". Arguably, it wasn't invented by Gen Alpha, but it really seems to have been embraced by them as slang in a way not done by any previous generation. As far as I know, it was actually invented by Gen Z as a sort of tongue-in-cheek reaction to de-facto online censorship of words like "die", but for quite a long time was mostly used not as a general-purpose slang word, but very deliberately in specific situations to say "I am using this word because I am forced to, which is a commentary on the state of things". Most Gen Zers wouldn't actually use "unalive" unironically in everyday conversations (which I think would be seen as a bit cringe to most of them).
However, a lot of Gen Alpha seems to have heard this word so much in UA-cam videos, etc, that they have actually adopted it, entirely unironically, as a slang term which they use in their everyday lives. What used to be a social/political statement is now just another word for the next generation. So even if they didn't _invent_ the term, they have arguably invented _its use as ordinary slang,_ which I think is an interesting phenomenon in and of itself.
I think the term unalive can be traced to social media as a more...ahem... age appropriate way to say suicide, so they could keep their ad dollars. I had never heard the term until recent years, I am 28 years old, and most people explained that they used the term to avoid being flagged for inappropriate language.
@josephlh1690 this is the actual reason why. It's to avoid demonitization.
Er, what? Alpha's *oldest* members just hit their freshman year of high school, are you aware of that? Gen Z's younger half absolutely uses this and the younger generation is just copying them. This is one of the major problems with this, stuff being attributed to "Alpha" because someone has seen high school kids using it for a few years now and not like... the 8-12 age bracket.
It’s only used by 20-40year olds on social media in order to avoid demonetization. It started on TikTok and spread to other platforms from there. It’s not used in any other setting so I wouldn’t classify it as slang. It’s definitely not any sort of gen alpha slang so that’s a bit weird to think it’d be included in a gen alpha slang video
Wow, I guess nobody here even bothered to read what I actually wrote. Is basic reading comprehension really that bad nowadays?
I literally said *in my second sentence* that the term wasn't invented by Gen Alpha, but by Gen Z to avoid de-facto online censorship (hint: that was talking about demonetization. That's what I meant).
I also already explicitly said that _the ones who originally invented it do _*_not_*_ use it as slang._ *That was part of my whole point.*
But I definitely have heard quite a few Gen Alpha people using the term completely unironically as everyday slang, *unlike previous generations did.* That is the point.
And yes, some people you might consider "young Gen Z" may use it too. There is no precise internationally-standardized dividing line between Gen Z and Alpha, you know. This is a cultural thing and who exactly gets put into which category is entirely a matter of opinion. The point is that the *majority* of Gen Z do not use it as slang, but Gen Alpha increasingly does, which is a difference between the two generations in general.
I really just watched a 21 minute video about gen alpha slang wihout skipping a minute. Great video mate
Gen Alpha's slang hasn't changed much at all from Gen Z slang. I bet elementary schoolers are just repeating the slang they are hearing Gen Z influencers say on TikTok
as some one who works with children, yup!!
This is exactly true I’ve literally seen it happen in real time
Largely yes, but I think there’s two other things happening.
A) kids aren’t fully understanding what some gen z slang means and so aren’t using it quite “right,” which annoys gen z.
B) Kids latch onto things they think are cool and make them their whole personality. That’s not new, but gen Alpha kids have more access to the internet than any generation before them at that age, and so they’re exposed to (and creating) content created specifically for them. I think this echo chamber is part of why Gen alpha talk the way they do.
It's not like generations are distinct groups of people. It's a conintuum so I'm not surprised that the slang doesn't keep made up generational lines.
yeah dude, this is prob a big part of it
The sigma term is a bit more complicated than explained in this video. The meme isn't, that sigma is "super alpha"; it's that the sigma is a "lone wolf", that is neither "alpha" nor "beta".
The first time I came across the term, it was being used satirically, to mock the whole concept of alpha and beta males and red pill culture, but according to Wikipedia (which, I acknowledge, might not be the best source for tracking origins for different internet lingo), it originated as a serious concept by an alt-right writer in 2010. I think this highlights an interesting pattern of a kind of an irony loop where a controversial term gets shot up in popularity, by people using it both ironically and unironically and it getting increasingly difficult to tell, which is which.
maybe thats where the misunderstanding aspect comes in - for gen a they misunderstood the context they heard it in and just got that sigma is better than alpha so they use it to mean ultimate alpha.
When you watch the videos that came out a few years ago that were popularising the term, you find that it basically just means AuDHD
It's strange because sigma is one of the last letters is in the Greek alphabet. I thought when they say, " What the sigma?" it literally meant "What the insignificant...."
I was around when sigma started to get popularized on a certain forum. It really comes from movie tropes. Basically, you have the Alpha, who was the strong leader. The Beta, the follower. Then some people pointed out that some characters in movies/tv shows were neither alpha nor beta. Such as villain characters, antiheros, lone wolf characters, etc. etc. So those types were determined to be Sigma.
This also lead people to create even more greek letter men. such as Delta males, Omega males. etc.
Here is the thing though. You will notice every following group other then Alpha males are not umm... social people and are not as negative as Beta males.
That is to say, it was a bunch of terminally online guys who didn't like being categorized as Betas because they didn't hit the gym or socialize. So they started inventing their own types where they were the coolest type. Way more cool then Alpha males!
I also think it comes from toxic male culture. Being “Six Sigma” certified is a form of corporate speak that means you are better than others and meant for executive or higher levels of your business status. IMO.
I love how so much of this sounds like it could be some sort of weather report:
"There's a vowel merger slowly spreading east across Pennsylvania, and GOAT has changed part of speech to past-participle, which means expect back-formations soon."
*whether rapport
*wither rapid
I want to know what this vowel merger is. I probably already do it, here in W. PA. Cot/Caught maybe? (usually the same pronunciation here.)
@@dloorkour1256 yeah cot/caught. that's why he brought up coffee.
@@nyanuwu4209 drizz maxing or cloud yeeting.
I'm from Australia & started using "banger" in the late 90's! You're very welcome!
Struth.
I thank England for giving us both English
I could've sworn sigma originated from a play on alpha and beta, as a way to be adjacent and "above" the ridiculousness of the pseudo-scientific dichotomy. "They're not an alpha but they aren't a beta either. They're a sigma." The self awareness faded and sigma was lumped back into just being "better" in the same way alpha is better.
As far as I know, a sigma is a lonewolf, not a follower or leader.
It was *originally* un-self-aware, but people mocked it so voraciously that people like Alpha-M and other grifters stopped using it all together.
Yeah, it's another one of those shifting euphemism things, this time out of protofascist incel culture, who wanted to add something to their nomenclature where one group of incels, themselves feeling excluded from alpha-male competition, proposed there was this other group who they supposed was so cool *because* they refused to compete in the hierarchy of masculinity because they were simply too cool and apart from it's pettiness, just like sigma is all the way over in the greek alphabet, but then they just shoved sigma above alpha in that same (fictional) hierarchy, giving themselves a potential redemption arc.
It seems implied that alphas win by beating the competition but a sigma wins by simply being, both by being so far apart nobody sees them and because nobody would dare challenge them. It's not just above the top, it's above *competing* for the top, which makes it doable. Like "maybe the fact that I'm so fucked up means people should fear me, maybe I am a sigma". It's a deeply messed up power fantasy....
Aaand now all that incell stuff is mainstream, great.
I thought it was a reference to 6-sigma, a super-narrow slice of the greatest amplitude.
The first I remember seeing about “Sigma” as a classification was something similar to Alpha but not inclined towards leadership for one reason or another.
Ironically Sigma as a label for a subset of people is no more or less valid than Alpha or Beta is, the concept of this hierarchy is derived from debunked studies about wolves.
Great video as always. As a black Gen-Xer, I laugh so hard when I hear all of the "new" slang . It's nice to have a linguist break down and explain the actual origins of these terms. Also love your distinction between slang and dialect. Keep up the good work. Also, getting onomatopoeia right on the first try is truly epic.
So Fun. GenX here. I was popping and locking in the 1980s. Salinas Valley CA.
So NOT funny to me THEN. My Dad used to play NWA Dopeman to his HS seniors and very Compassionately and passionate his Young Ladies to not to be a Berry . Or let ANYONE run a Train "
I moved to OK with some Faerie Godchildren recently and Cal he's 10 was delighted to show me his favorite UA-cam videos. Introducing me to the BRILLIANT video of Lil Nas Cant tell me Nothing.
BEST historical cowboy costume in the opening scene. Oklahoma is over 20% Black and has 38 different Tribal Nations.
And Black Cowboys for Trump. Definitely REAL ate the Best Shrimp Boil of my life he cooked. It's REALLY different here than the West Coast.
The Weed is OFF the Chain strong and affordable. Over 400 dispensaries in OK City ALONE. And only medical. Want to keep this shit isc on the DL.
Fun using some GenX slang
Then I got to explain who Billy Ray Siris was. He kinda knew Miley. Then we all did the Achy Breaky Heart dance. ❤️
I think yeet and rizz are some of the best slang words. And I’m really old.😂
@@flockofone9214 I think they're some of the best words, too. You really know who is single-digit IQ in the room when someone uses them.
You should have just left it at "this is skibidi jones" 😭
I should have made merch
skibbidi zaddy
I was going to write exactly this lol
@@languagejones oh, and we don't say cheugy
@@languagejones Might be interesting to do a video on UA-camse - creative alternative vocabulary used by UA-cam content creators to avoid getting their videos demonetized. e.g. un-alived in place of killed; PDF-file in place of pedophile; etc.
@@caribbeanman3379 Nah, avodemo is sadge.
Totally rad vid. Your analysis is both mondo and tubular.
I'm the translator that used "sus" in an anime and upset so many people that it became trending on Twitter.
Some of the audience knew "sus" was a thing long before Among Us; others thought I was mistranslating it to try to look cool.
The word in Japanese was "kyodou fushin", which literally means to behave suspiciously, and the character says "kyodoru", which is the shortened (also somewhat old) slang version of the word.
It's been five years and I still get people harassing me about that completely unprovoked.
But also, it's interesting that a lot of the same words in different languages end up having equivalent slang words in other languages. Convergent evolution.
still kinda sus idk if i should believe you
Even if this is sus, I choose to believe it because I think it's really funny how mad the use of "sus" in translations makes people.
Reminds me of outrage in Star Rail where March says "When in Rome," as clearly that can't exist in the original mandarin! Except, the original mandarin is something like, "When in a town, follow the rules of the local magistrate," and has long been translated to "When in Rome," due to the similarity of the idioms.
@@DoctorMagoo111 lmao yeah, they have no idea how often idioms are getting translated into different, ideally similar, idioms. That one just happens to be a noticeable example because Rome, but it's _everywhere_ . It simply means nothing to a non-Japanese speaker, for example, if I say "dangos over flowers" or "don't know when the potatoes are done".
@@reimiyasaka I love matching idioms, some more examples,
"going scorched earth/baby with the bathwater" vs. "burning jade and [common] stone alike" or "cutting the weeds burning the roots",
"putting your foot in your moth" vs. "kicking an iron plate"
"hitting a sore nerve" vs. "touching the [dragon's] reverse scale"
"broken clock is right twice a day" vs. "blind cat stumbling on the dead mouse"
I know a lot more but can't think of them off the top of my head....
I kinda get them though, translations imo should be more timeless, not dependent on passing slang that would no be in use in a couple of years.
Dude, 80's slang was rad. Totally bodacious. Today's slang is grody to the max I mean like gag me with a spoon.
Truly righteous. Rock on!
@@flubnub266 Keep on truckin' the weather is getting gnarly....
That’s Bitchen
Word up!! That was da bomb yo.
Radical
Here I was thinking "fleek" absolutely predated Gen Alpha and had been under the impression that it's already fallen out of fashion.
I think it does. There’s a woman in her mid-20s who claims to have invented the word by randomly describing her eyebrows as “on-fleek” one day and posting a video of it. If she is actually the originator, then definitely not a gen alpha word.
And I definitely don’t hear it anymore, so I figured it had fallen out of fashion too, but I admit I’m not exactly a representative sample.
@@ioutyeah, eyebrows on fleek is from either a Vine or a video from when vine was popular
Yeah i remember hearing this word being used in school back when vine was around. I haven't heard the word used much since, but I guess it stuck around enough to get popular with kids again.
I remember it being considered gen z slang a while back, weird to see it being called gen alpha slang (i mean im not surprised they use it too, kids copying teenagers to seem more mature makes sense). Same with yeet, lit, hype, drip, etc.
even rizz was gen z slang for a bit, but i think many of us stopped using it when younger kids started saying it. It became not cool anymore (kinda similar story with sus and among us stuff in general?)
A thesis of mine, which seems kinda obvious to me, is that less affluent strata of society who invest their mental efforts not into love for language tend to save effort in the facial muscle department and through that muscular laziness you get a dialect or tone of speaking. You can even try it out, speak with a minimum of muscle effort and listen to the result. The counterpart to that is 'posh' speech which wants to put great effort into pronunciation in order to show off superiority, or in less snobbish cases to live the love for the beauty of language and its fine details.
Linguistically there is the same, usually expressed through: "As long as I am understood, what's the problem?", so people simplify speech to --save-- avoid effort.
The drip example about dropping relevant words I encountered, too, and it bothers me because it's not always slang but often simply misuse that can cause confusion. For example how "hysterical laughter" dropped the laughter part and then people think "hysterical" means funny. Also one time there was miscommunication about music when someone thought that ska is punk. I had to explain that ska is Jamaican music related to reggae and that what he means is ska punk.
Then there are almost amusingly confusable instances like how something being "shit" is the opposite of it being "the shit", and then add how people sometimes refer to stuff they actually like as "shit".
The clickbait video title habit surely also contributes to some linguistic and mental extremisms forming. We underestimate how much such choices of conduct shape our future. Now every time someone makes a reasonable counter-argument, he UTTERLY DESTROYED the other person. It is so sighworthy.
11:34 I like "groovy" because there's actual sense behind it, well, as long as it is used only for musical appeal or its analogous effects in other areas. It refers to music that helped field slaves plow the fields, making the grooves, basically a repeating pattern of a nature that helps them just go on with the mindless task and feel good about it. The music follows a groove.
Censorship might also be contributing, when people use algorithm dodge words and they become more or less codified. On the other hand, dodging censorship could probably be not nearly mainstream enough to have an impact, and the norm is that NPCs never learn which parts of their expression vanishes. Exception being the pre-social-media sphere you gave an example of with sheesh. (For frickin' Pete's sake, geez!)
This is for real one of those "trust me, the video is more interesting than you think" types. I learned a lot, thanks man
@@TirelessGod thank you!
Stan. Lol jkjk
I have heard it said that "yeet" is the opposite of "yoink", in that they connote the same sense of casualness, just in opposing directions (away vs. toward).
The word "yoink" could be onomatopaic related to the verb "to yank" ('yoink' is the sound you make when you yank something/someone).
I first learned the verb "to yank" (I am a Dutch speaker, English is only my third language) with the meaning of "copy" or "pull in" in the context of the Linux editor sed, which has the commands yiw (yank in current word), yaw = (yank all word, includes a trailing space) and yap (yank all paragraph, includes trailing newline).
I propose that we add yiw, yaw and yap to slang.
Like "poof" is the sound of vanishing in a puff of smoke, so "foop" must be the sound of _appearing_ out of nowhere.
@@AmedeeVanGasse Yaw and yap are words already, and one of them already is used as slang. Yaw is one of the three degrees of freedom for a vessel, whether marine or aerial, along with pitch and roll. Yap is the sound a small dog makes, and as slang it means talking incessantly.
"Shooketh" originally came from the old medieval tapestry memes around 15-20 years ago that were all over 4chan and YTMND
Yeah - he's complaining that this isn't how the -eth suffix works. It goes on the infinitive root form, not a past tense form.
A lot of "Gen Z" and "Gen Alpha" slang and memes is just millenial shit from 4chan that they've seen in reposted memes, its funny how few people realize how much they've been influenced by 4chan.
@@jimkuback5008 4chan is the naked singularity that is the quantum random source of all chaos on the Internet.
Yea this one's easily like 15 years old
I miss those memes.
Thats one jiive turkey. I can get jiggy with this video. You goated fo’sho
1337
I've been saying "get jiggy with it" and "I dig it" as long as I can remember (I'm 27,) because my mom spoke that way. Her father was a jazz artist.
Word
@@EmilyH-u2hget jiggy with it was a will Smith song in the late 90s. And "ya dig?" for you understand is at least as old as 1970s TV, so probably way older, in AAVE.
Goated is too young
I'm firmly in Gen Z (closer to the older end by most definitions) and almost all of these words were extremely popular with my cohort when I was in high school. Many of them only became common towards the end, but they definitely weren't created or popularised by people younger than me. Some of the ones you described as being from the 20th century or before did have a slightly different meaning to my cohort than what you described. I'm still not convinced that "cheugy" ever saw significant usage by _anyone,_ much less before millenials started writing articles about it.
Wait does Gen z say "cohort" a lot or is that just you 😂
@@djbeema I'm talking about generational differences. It's a relevant term with a specific meaning in this context.
Cohort is a very technical term, often used in statistics. It's for example in the name of google's ad tracking concept "FLoC", Federated Learning of Cohorts.
Specifically, a cohort is defined as a group, usually of people, who share a defined characteristic.
Hey did you know i have an extension that brings back the guy in your pfp and his real name is mr jingles
Holy fuck, I'm early-ish millenial, and having you, a person that is referring to high school in the past tense, refer to "the 20th century" as if it were a mythical time of mystery made me feel REALLY goddamn old.
chronically online person here with some added info:
12:48 if anyone really wants to know: the term skibidi comes from a song called Dom Dom Yes Yes, originally by Biser King and later became viral due to the cover by Fiki. The line "schtibidi dom dom yes yes" is (from my understanding) just scatting, and has literally no meaning. It became popular due to a Turkish man dancing along to it, where it stayed popular for a little while. After a while Alexey Gerasimo (a russian animator) made an animation of a video game character's head coming out of a toilet and singing the song, which went viral among Gen Alpha on scrolling apps like tik tok and youtube shorts. Gen Z and millennials found out about "Skibidi Toilet" (as it was affectionately titled) with basically no context (not that there was much to begin with) and found it hilarious because it seemed like the first piece of media that was made for Gen Alpha and not Gen Z, and made all of the 16-22 year olds feel old. From there people started ironically using the term "Skibidi" i think as just a nonesense word. Skibidi Toilet was so popular and it meant absolutely nothing that i think just mentioning it was humorous to the point where people would replace any adjective with skibidi for no reason, i.e, "Thats so skibidi" or "screw my skibidi life." It literally does not mean anything, to anyone, for any reason.
18:40 while sheesh has been around for a long time, theres been a resurgence due to the "sheesh" memes. its old and dead by now but it was a meme where someone said sheesh in a funny high pitched voice and pointed to their arms (i think to point out the "ice in their veins"). So sheesh has been around for a long time, but it recently has a new reference that might add more context to the usage.
19:47 Similar to sheesh, sus has been around for a long time, but was rejuvenated with the Among Us craze during the covid pandemic. Among Us is a mafia-type game where there are imposters trying to kill other players, and since you were often typing or in heated debates, it was a lot easier to say sus rather than suspicious, and since so many people were saying it, I think its safe to say it regained popularity. It also has a double-meaning where people often use it to call someone gay? which im not sure if that was a common usage of it before Gen Z. Usually someone would call someone "sus" if they make a gay joke or do something somewhat gay, and not just as a straight up insult or slur.
20:03 I think it should be noted that I (as a member of Gen Z) have only usually ever heard this in sexual contexts, so maybe beware if you want to use this one in front of your kids or younger family. (someone correct me if im wrong here but i havent heard it used in many other contexts)
20:24 as far as im concerned, "yeet" came from a vine where someone threw something into a crowd and yelled "yeet!" If that isnt the origin of the phrase, it's definitely where it was popularized among Gen Z, as it went pretty viral. I distinctly remember a lot of people yelling yeet when they threw things in middle school.
Millennial gamer here. "Yeet" has been used in the gaming sphere for at least 15 years.
Never seen "sus" in context of calling something gay. Only seen it when a commenter hints that an art, picture, thumbnail or short video comes from a "lewd" source.
"That profile pic is sus..." and so on.
@@r.d.6290 You'd be surprised. It's very often used for that. Almost like a group of boys going "AYOO" when they see or say a homoerotic thing. It functions almost exactly like an "AYOO" moment. But is also is just in reference to sexually lewd or innuendo like behavior. Just conveniently applied to homoerotic behavior.
@@innitbruv-lascocomics9910 i first saw sus on tiktok comments in 2020 and it was almost always used cruelly to indirectly call people gay. It took a bit before i realised it had a much broader usage.
@@r.d.6290it definitely is
The fact that stan came from an Eminem song will never stop being funny to me.
Blew my mine the first time I made the connection
@@roboterson How is this even a connection that one would have to make? That's like making the connection between the song "Thrift Shop" by Macklemore and... thrift shops.
@@-47- Macklemore's Thrift Shop didn't originate the use of the term "thrift shop". The difference is Eminem's "Stan" invented the use of the term "stan" to refer to an obsessive, unhinged fan, as opposed to as a person's name. We can't normally trace slang term back to a single specific known originating use.
@@hypercube8735 didnt stan come from kpop culture and its huge problem with stalkers?
@@tofire2261no. It came from the Eminem song that heavily samples a Dido song. Nothing to do with k pop.
I like your suggestion of doing old slang! I might also suggest flapper slang as a source. "Flappers" were an aesthetic group of ladies in the 1920s. Some of their slang fell out of fashion (e.g. using "blouse" as a verb meaning "to leave"), some stuck around as colloquialisms ("daddy-o, cat's meow"), and some settled into the mainstream and we forgot it was slang (snuggle, dapper). Pretty interesting era, linguistically-speaking!
this comment explains why there is slang
@@johncribbs8382 Yep. Slang usually comes out of youth cultures. In seeking self-identity, young people try hard to seem different from "those stodgy old guys." Novel forms of speaking are one way of doing it, and an appealing turn of phrase has a way of catching on.
Car guys have been using the term sleeper for years. A car being a "total sleeper" would mean it looks slow but is actually fast, especially when discussing drag racing.
same thing with PCs, but yeah cars is likely where it has been used the most. And now with gym culture
Sleeper was also a term used during the cold war era to signify russian secret agents living among american population. "Sleeper agents" as they were called, usually lived in small communities and were taught to speak perfect american english. It is unknown how many sleeper agents existed in USA during the cold war period, but it is certain that this was more likely used to discredit and destroy the reputation of a US citizen that acted in some way against the system.
Being called a sleeper agent was a big deal when communism was seen as a disease and literal witch hunts were done against people suspected of communist activities.
I think that the slang for cars being sleepers is a direct lift from "sleeper agents" which were supposed to look and act like normal US citizens but were in fact russian spies.
yea that's been a thing for quite some time, and not only for cars, tho that does seem to be the origin or at least an early usage
@@mancamiatipoola yes, this! i was thinking cars were the early use, but you gotta be right that sleeper agent was the OG
@@vanzwho854the PC world definitely took it from cars, but yeah the meaning is the same. Something an opponent or critic might mistakenly "sleep on", so not give much thought to.
@languagejones, Gucci has been around since at least 1993 where it was being used in the military; “Gucci kit” was the term for “high quality equipment”.
Saves me a post, if UK boomers used it Gen Alpha definitely can't claim it.
Also in the 90's we referred to Patagonia as Patagucci since their outdoor clothing and gear was high quality and expensive.
w explanation fr fr ong
As far as I'm concerned it was used way before 1993.
I remember them using it in the movie Sniper, which came out in 1993. I'd bet it goes back a fair bit further then that.
love the video but i was born in the middle of gen z and nobody i know coast to coast my age has ever heard of anyone using "cheugy"
literally no idea where people get that from, we've been confused about this for years
Apparently some girl made it up, then a big tik tok user popularized it. I don’t know.
yeah, I've heard it was misattributed to gen z by millenials, but I'm not sure how that might have happened and I never really looked into it.
Yeah the only people I've heard using it in conversation were millennials, but it was the first time I had heard of the word, and I've only ever seen it used online since.
After a bit of looking up chuegy is very similar to the Filipino word chugi/tsugi which means "something to be considered dead or not a thing anymore"
@@blockshift758 Now THAT'S cool.
Groovy came about as a term for good music, because of the grooves on vinyl records.
Elizabeth Taylor called Richard Burton a "simp" in 1966 Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? they both sigma rizz no cap
Simpleton
I love that movie!
on god?
@@TraesHisTraxx I thought it comes from simpering.
Given the time period, she was probably calling him a Communist sympathizer, i.e. a "symp."
I taught my 3-year old to say "Get off my lawn!" instead of "go away!"
Why do I find that deliciously comical? 😂
Teach him how to get lvl 999 fanum tax gyatts by W rizz with snake like Drake from Ohio too
🤌
Remember "class clown?" Well you people are comment clowns and I love it!
Love this video! I used to be obsessed with slang but the way it is now doesn’t feel as creative. I really love your breakdown, thank u sir, u got a new sub.
Consider me one more person who wants the Middle English pet peeve video!! I always cringe when people say “thou doth” or “he hast,” or when they add “-eth” to things that aren’t even verbs lmao
It all started with "ye olde" and has been downhill ever since... Is what I *would* say if it wasn't even older. You see, "went" is the past tense of a mostly obsolete verb called "wend"- now found only in the phrase "wend one's way". The original past tense of "go" was "yeed" (which my spellcheck is very annoyingly autocorrecting). But after "yeed" had mostly died out, poets like Spencer mistook it for an infinitive, so they invented "yeeded". We also get "holier than thou" (although that might be accurate since Romeo says "For thou, fair maid, art far more fair than she"). "Powers that be" *is* accurate. It comes from Tyndall's translation of the bible.
Cant make oldtimey jokes without studying middle english first? Seems practical.
Honestly the fact that it's completely historically inaccurate makes it funnier for me
@@zephlodwick1009 I had been led to believe (by some other linguistic vid on youtube - possibly RobWords?) that 'the' was originally written in English with a letter which didn't exist in the German typeset that they began setting bibles in, so they settled on using the 'y' as an alternative, so when you saw the word 'ye' everyone reading just knew, at the time, that it was pronounced 'the'.
Honestly, the fact it’s super wrong is kind of the point, it’s intentionally absurd, which is a bit of a common theme in new language developments
If I remember correctly, Sus made it's return back when the game "Amoung Us" went viral, instead of pronouncing the whole word "suspicious", gamers abbreviated the word as gamers often do.
Yes, and the otherwise non-gaming streamers and youtubers who played among us continued the practise, meaning that a lot of young people got the shortened form from their media consumption during covid.
Sus has been in Australian slang for decades before amogus popularised it more widely
To sus someone out has been used since the late 1800s so it definitely has a longer history then among us
Where I live everyone of every age says sus for suspicious and also “sus it out” to figure something out
@@FiftySixishTVexactly… this is an expression I’ve used my whole life in Oz and I’m 53.
NPC is 100% pre 80's roleplaying games and referred to any characters the DM invested in.
Well yeah, but using it as a slur for real people is much newer.
@@MrShermo No, it's not lol
@@MrShermosince when is it a slur? I thought it was still just a rather harsh insult applicable to pretty much anyone, did someone pin it to a specific group at some point?
Oldmate just doesn't understand what slur means and thinks it's applicable to any generic word that is used to insult. @@Boxygirl96
@@Drazard >.> "Oldmate" is probably a lot older than you, Drazard, so they use the word as it was used when they learned the meaning, which is more in-line with the definition and a completely correct usage of the term. What the word means and how it is used, however, are different in modern language. A slur is just an insinuation, innuendo, or allegation that is meant to insult them or damage their reputation... however the term slur seems like it was muddled/focused on the Ethic Slur pejoratives and then became a word used to describe pejoratives generally aimed at a group of people. NPC is a slur, because it is insinuating that the person is... not a person, they're a Non-Player Character devoid of choice, thought, and autonomy.
Your mention of the newish word ‘cheugy’ and its uncertain origin sparcked a few semi-retired brain cells. There is a similar sounding word that is much used in Thai, a word that I have often heard and occasionally used for more than half a century. เชย ( choeuy ) means out-dated, out-moded, contemptibly ordinary, damnably quotidian, perversely unstimulating. The word is also used to describe a null feeling about or substantial non-reaction to people, things, processes, etcetera which might be soporifically categorized as ‘choeuy.’ It might be a stretch, but if there were to be another borrowing from Thai, เชย ( choeuy ) would be a very useful addition. The only non-noun Thai expression that I have frequently encountered among English speakers is นิดหน่อย (nit-noi), which means small-small.
NPC is from D&D and other TTRPGs. Video games borrowed the term from there.
If anyone challenges you on this, tell them my Hunt the Wumpus/Holmes Basic bona fides have your back
That is until they start tryi ng to use CPU somehow
Came to say this, and pleased as heck to see a Hunt the Wumpus reference.
The man literally said D&D was punching above its weight class. 🤣🧙🏻♂️
"I don't care what your textbook says" is such an alpha move, coming from a wolf. From a PhD, I mean.
WHAT THE F I WAS REPLYING TO COMMENTS IN MY NOTIFICATIONS AND UA-cam PUT IT HERE.
I am so sorry Jakobbauz.
@@bunk_foss Yeah... no worries. You can always just delete your comments...
@@jakobbauz Bless you.
based
This guy is the endgame boss for people who watch videos at 2x speed
Oof. I was watching this at 1.5x and had to tone it down to 1.25x lol
Hmm, I started at regular 3.7 and had to reduce to 2.35...
Nah, not even close to Louis Rossmann
Yes
@@chocolatezt based
This is a very enlightening video, and I think most of what you said is spot on, but there's one note I'd like to make. "Tea" is more of a play with words than a misspelling. In gay culture it is intentionally invoking the practice of old ladies meeting in a living room to have tea and gossip about their peers. They're spilling the truth while having tea. That's why it's intentionally spelled that way.
On a related note, I think it's impressive how black culture and gay culture pretty much invent 90% of the influential slang in English. It's not that dissimilar here in Brazil (though it's not necessarily black, rather just the poorer communities and again, gay culture), so I think there might be something to it -- be a minority, create your sociolect, people find it cool, then it spreads.
The only slang from straight people that ever caught on in my short millennial life here was "top" for something that is "top notch" or "top of the leaderboard." Everything else is gay or favela.
Honestly most “gen alpha” slang lists are full of slang us Gen Zer’s were using but I guess adults never caught it until Gen Alpha started parroting it.
And….It’s mostly black slang
It usually is. Every generation. @@merrytunes8697
And most Gen Z slang is just Gen X and Millennial slang from the hood.
@@merrytunes8697 definitely tied to rap's popularity too. Jit has been used around Florida to mean someone young, and I've been seeing it more and more often as Florida rappers gained popularity in the mainstream the past 10 years.
@@merrytunes8697 yup, and when black people are using is it's wrong, but as soon as white newscaster pick up on it 5,10, or 20 years later is "all good" lol
I think Gen Alpha is still a little young to know what their slang will be. Gotta give them about 5 years, imo.
Oldest Gen Alpha are 15 this year 😔
@HannibalKing-e7eyup. Most of their slang is gen z out of context lol. 😂 sometimes I think I know what they mean but they change the meaning just because
Most people butcher the terms and use them for pop culture demographics, not entire generati0ons. This count gave Gen X ten years and Y about twelve, LOL. In other words, they have never been about generations.
@@ahleenah 14
No mention of “goon” is valid if not slightly disappointing.
goon as a noun (the mob boss and his goons) or goon as a verb (what is a goon cave?)?
never goon
@@Rondart goon as a verb (gooner being the noun)
The first discussion of goon that I have ever wanted to read ROFLmao.
In australia we call wine that comes in bags "goon" so you'd be drinking goon
Another 1 for extra is to my knowledge only a journalism term but since the 19th century an EXTRA[EXTEA EXTRA READ ALL ABOUT IT] refers to a breaking news story that is usually printed relatively quickly after the story breaks. When it comes to an EXTRA in the news, it is usually reported on and reprinted several times as the story gets updated.
man I still don't like hearing "mid" as just another way to say "bad", to me it's still a notch above "bad". Like it's still competently made but doesn't exceed into anything special or I guess "good".
edit: I appreciate the insight in the replies I keep getting btw :J
Mid take on god
@@leonardo9259 mid as in mid or mid as in bad??????? lol
But what if I got that *fire* mid tho?
I think your right, I think of mid as something that's made just well enough to get people to think it's good while I think it's not good
Mid to me is weird as I am like "Do you mean middle of the road? Just inoffensive?
I had always assumed that 'tea' was about sharing gossip over a cup of tea.
Maybe? I always interpreted it as referring to the act of "spilling the tea", in which something contained is released all over (and cannot be recontained). I don't think any interpretation is incompatible with either of the others.
@@evolving_doreYep, same thing as older gens using Spill the beans
It is this guy just acting confident over not knowing anything in THIS realm
I had assumed that too but I had previously researched the term after finding out about its use in Polari and realised that one of the theories is that it has a double meaning as 'T' for Truth and the fun word play of spilling tea.
What's the "T" as in what's the "truth"
I feel like "Skibidi" has to come from jazz scatting somehow.
@@FloridaCore this seems most likely
Yeah I was gonna say, I'm pretty sure skibidi has been in use by jazz musicians for decades, it's definitely not new 😂
Didn’t the current usage of skibidi come from the Toilet in Ohio videos? That was definitely jazz style scat, but not a jazz song.
Feels scatman inspired
it’s from a song
I turned 16 a few weeks back and I still don't have a frickin' clue about their slang and peculiar sentence structure. 😂
"What sigma means?"
"It means alpha💀"
But more "low-key" alpha, when you get into the minutia.
Dont recall streamer Destiny being some low key Alpha, dudes just a cuck
Also that a skull means 😂
@@moshdeenotabot"I'm dead" from laughing so hard.
Some guy was beaking off drunk and got in people's faces hollering "I'm a sigma male"........ Instantly said back to him " what? You're a smegma man"
Few things. I believe sus is a form of convergent evolution between the origination of what you mentioned and a shortening of suspicious during the height of the Amongus era in the pandemic.
Yeet was popularized by a 2014 Vine where the first usage was some dude throwing a CD.
Probably due to Jerma985 that knew the term from the spell of the same name in steve Jackson's sorcery (iirc)
“SUS” comes from the video game “Among Us”. Which became popular during the pandemic. Suspicious about who is the traitor. It’s just short term for chatting in that game and became adapted to vocal speech. IMO
Nope, just no.
Here in Australia we have been referring to things or people that we don't quite trust as "sus" for at least 30 years...
"Need to get more milk. I chucked the one from the fridge, it was a bit sus."
"Watch out for that dude, he's a bit sus."
@@kathozog9740 came here to say this after taking a selfie for the mob
People have been saying sus since well before AmongUs.
The first time I felt really old was when I heard a kid say "ratchet"--and I said "Wretched?" "No, ratchet." "But...that's already a word."
that's another reinterpretation of an accent!
MY THOUGHTS EXACTLY
In NZ growing up in the 90s 00s we said "Rat shit"... Probably came from misunderstanding american accents?
@@machematix Interesting. Plus with the shifted vowels in NZ English, you'd get something that would be somewhat close to how I would pronounce "wretched" in western Pennsylvania.
Yes!! And "swag" instead of "swagger!" 'Swag' is already a word, and they have no clue what the word 'swagger' means. Smh
I remember when people started describing an arrogant person as being "clout," not having heard this word before, I looked up the definition and become even more confused. Every time I heard another person using it in that wrong context, I rolled my eyes at their trendiness.
"Skibidi" sounds like something teenagers would have said 100 years ago.
skibidi doo dah?
23 skibidi-doo
Sounds like something straight out of scat music.
While having a snap battle with slicked back hair?
@@trajectoryunown i'm almost 100% convinced that skat music was the origin of it infact
I had to stop to laugh when you explained February Ramadan every 33 years
not so much explain, as allude to...it definitely took me a minute to get that
"fan is short for fanatic"
Did not know that. I assumed it had some connection to a literal fan.
Can't tell if serious or sarcastic 🤔 😅
When i was little i would imagine someone fanning themselves because they were so hot from being starstruck
Can’t tell if dumb or dumb.
This has to be a joke
Funny. I'm completely unsurprised that it's short for fanatic. Kind of seemed like an obvious connection. "Look at these crazy young people, they're fanatics. It's just a boy band." "Aww, don't say that, John. They're just having fun. And I hear they like to be called fans, not fanatics." "Fans? Youth and their ridiculous slang..."
It's ridiculous that you can find this kind of enlightenment by accident free of charge. I didn't even know I wanted to learn about this, but I really enjoyed learning from you. Well done sir.
i feel like a majority of the gen alpha list was stuff i and other gen-Zers were saying as teenagers as well. it’s for sure slang that gen alpha is also using, but mainstream gen Z used most of it as well (in addition to the actual original uses). outside of like mewing, skibidi, rizz, fanum tax, eating, sigma, and delulu (and cheugy but i don’t think anyone actually uses that outside of some millennials on tiktok) i was using basically all of these as a teen from my recollection, and quite a few were being used by my millennial sibling years before me.
also i believe “sheesh!” in this case is specifically referring to the usage associate with the “ice in my veins” pose? not a new word but a slightly different usage i think? but still like exasperated/amazed
Honestly this video was kind of a farce. “Here’s all the gen alpha slang”
Guess what, gen alpha is just using slang that they’ve heard. Dunking on them by saying “you didn’t make this up” is stupid. Who cares who made it up.
This languagejones guy is cooked.
My brother used "sheesh" in the early 70s. It's not new at all.
What you said about people mistakenly thinking an old slang term is new reminds me of a conversation I had with a fellow Gen Xer in the 1990s at the University of Minnesota. Bear in mind that I grew up near Washington, D.C., and he grew up in rural Minnesota.
I described someone I didn't respect as a "schmuck." He replied, "I love that word! It's the perfect combination of 'shit' and 'fuck'!"
I was surprised to hear this and it turned out he thought it was a term recently invented by Gen X. I told him that it is a very old term and comes from Yiddish, not a portmanteau of Anglo-Saxon vulgarisms.
He said he thought it was new because he heard it from students who came "from big cities out east." I asked if those big cities were ones with large Jewish populations and he said, "Yeah, I guess they are."
I then asked if he'd heard professors using the word "schmuck" and he said he had, but he'd assumed they'd learned it from students.
I had to give him some credit, though. There's not much Yiddish spoken in rural Minnesota, so it's easy to understand that he hadn't heard "schmuck" until he got to the university. And to his credit, he correctly determined the meaning "contemptible person" from context clues. And although his hypothesis about the etymology was wrong, it was plausible.
Where did he think the m came from? What a schlemiel! Lol
OMG, this reminds me of a time my husband cocked his head at me inquiringly and said "keshka?" Turned out he thought it was a Yiddish phrase because he'd heard a Jewish friend of our say "Qu'est-ce que?" - which is like the most Maine thing ever.
He obviously didn't watch much TV.
I am really intrigued at linguistic inflation -> "dish" -> "snack"
Is it shrinkflation in this case?
It'll be "morsel" next, then "crumb".
waiting for them to shorten hors d'oeuvres with the obvious consequences. Hilarity must ensue.
Nosh
Tapas, but very limited
Sleeper has also been a racing term for, basically a Ferrari F40 in a beat-up Ford Pinto for at least 3 decades. When the car looks like it ain't shit but it burns out everything at the track. Sleeper has also been termed to electronics like games and computers that look like cheap junk and has a $10 000 set of hardware under the hood.
17:22 in Cantonese/Chinese there is 低調, which literally means "low-key", and it means to conduct oneself/ do something in a inconspicuous manner, or in a way that doesn't attract extra attention. And yes the antonym of that is 高調 which literally means "high-key"
That is interesting.
Congratulations on 100K Dr Jones! You're officially a sigma, rizzler,get all the women (And men). W video. You deserve every bit of it!
Thank you! Once I get my plaque I can replace my hand drawn crayon & construction paper youtube wall art
@@languagejones Keep it! I'm sure it will give you nostalgia once you grow even further.
If I recall correctly, cheugy came from mexican slang in the 2000s maybe earlier. There was a huge debate over this last year when a resurgence of started and around the time Pokemon Scarlet and Violet used it in the English localization in 2022, a game that had been in development since before gen z where teenagers. They absolutely did not create it, but if I'm wrong then I'd love to know where I can reliably search things about etymology and lexicography. I want to see more videos like this! I love language and its history and this was really informative, thank you!
I thought it came from 90's surfer slang, but I could also be 100% wrong
I thought cheugy was the opposite of gucci
This… makes too much sense. Fits with my experience of the word
Same. It's like knockoff Gucci where the label is spelled wrong, CCUGI, and someone heard it and spelled it phonetically. They try real hard to look impressive but missed the mark.
Incredibly interesting and informative. Thanks for your knowledge.
As a Gen X, I find most of these ridiculous, but the word "Yeet" is one we've been needing. It has an emotional context that "throw", "chuck" and "hurl" are just lacking.
Yeah, it's like the long lost counterpart/antonym to "yoink!"
Agreed, Yeet is hilarious and clearly indicates a more dramatic throw that chuck and even hurl don't meet.
Of course "hurl" still works quite well for "puke". Very onomatopoeic. 😅
@@microbryPERFECT, yoink perfectly encompasses a friendly yet hilarious grab of someones personal belongings
Defenestration just doesn't have the same ring ;)
Love how my 10 year old thinks he's the coolest kid on earth when using these words that his grandfather probably used 60 years ago.
it's also worth mentioning that 'Looksmaxxing' was biggest in online incel communities before it became mainstream. In an incel context, "-maxxing" as a suffix describes things you do to maximize your chances of having sex with a woman, usually as a way to compensate for some other inherent flaw. "Mogging" is also an incel word from the acronym "Male Of Group", meaning to be overshadowed by a more dominant man, usually a Chad, another incel term.
The same thing happened with "-pilling", describing accepting a certain political ideology, usually a radicalizing one, though I don't think that's common outside of online gen z/millenial political spaces. Mewing wasn't invented for incels but it gained most of its traction there before escaping containment. (I'm pretty sure the fandom/politics phrase 'escaping containment' is going to become mainstream here in a few years as well.)
having been tracking right-wing and incel culture for almost a decade now, it's incredibly jarring to hear kids using the same words, even if they don't know about the hateful ideology behind it. i've seen this happen with a few other far-right words/memes in the last decade and it'd be fascinating to watch if it weren't also terrifying.
Hi, 15-year-old here. This is absolutely fascinating and I’d be interested in learning more about this. Is there anywhere I should go to read further?
@@baporwabe2241 I really debated how far to go down that rabbit hole and decided it was best for another stand alone video. I also need to add “based”!
@@mileslima8114
hi! most of this is from lived experience so I don't have any super in-depth resources i've personally used recently. But I'll try!
Content warning for antisemitism, misogyny, and violent bigotry. I tried to make these as accessible as possible to beginners but it's still very upsetting to read.
Contrapoints' video 'Incels' is a good explainer of the basics of incel ideology. Moonshot's 'Incels: A Guide to Symbols and Terminology' is super in-depth on terminology, history, and origins, and there are a lot of good jumping-off points for finding other rabbitholes to go down. It's also very dense. The ISD explainer 'Memes & the Extreme Right-Wing' also explains far-right icons that have entered the mainstream and has several links to other related articles.
I can't hyperlink but I tried to use the most Google-friendly titles I could. Let me know if you have any issues with finding these!
@@languagejones מבוסס
Israeli communities are using the word "based" translated into Hebrew.
@@baporwabe2241 Thank you for your service O7
I have a white co-worker that thought only nice looking cars were "Whips" (via the context clues). I had to tell him All Cars are "Whips" but ugly cars are also known as "Hoopties"
Man, I haven't heard hoopty since 1996.
First time I heard "vibing" I thought it meant to get high and when I learned what it was I thought "so it's just a verb of the really old slang".
@@bjornsan SO OLD
@@languagejones 'Vibe check' sounds like when you test the batteries in your sex toys...
@@nyanuwu4209I’ve been laughing for like 10 minutes how did you come up with this 💀
vibing has also been used by jazz musicians in a negative way. when you're making fun of someone, mocking their talents as a musician, taking the piss, that kinda thing, that's "vibing" somebody
if you're "vibing" that's like you're "chilling (out)" which depending on the person might imply getting high. That's less on the word and more on circumstances, though.
Isn't yeet from that vine of a girl throwing an empty soda can in the hallway?
Exactly she Yeeted that soda can 😂
I thought "It's giving" was simply erasing the implicit "vibes" after the adjective.
Like, "It's giving creepy vibes" becomes "It's giving creepy" or "It's giving poor vibes" becomes "It's giving poor"
Exactly. When I first heard it I thought, oh are we abandoning the word "vibes" now? I would have been fine with that.
I'm not a fan of this one. It always leaves me feeling like something's missing from the sentence.
@@RobBulmahn it's just grammatically incorrect, it should be shortened to "giving creepy vibes" or "creepy vibes..", you remove the fluff words that can be easily inferred by context, not the stuff that actually matters!
@@swedneck Why waste time say lot word when few word do trick?
I think a noun follows "it's giving," not an adjective.
I'm a Millennial who went back to college recently, and one of my classmates was astounded that I could use "gen alpha slang" even though... it's literally a side-effect of me being terminally online and the fact that so few of these words were new to me. She lost her mind when I said our lab group should just finish up and "gtfo" as if we hadn't been shortening words to text them on god awful cell phone keyboards back in the day. That slang is older than her, but she was surprised I was using it. Idk, I just felt baffled. I'm glad this video existed, which sort of helped me understand why it didn't feel like new slang. Because a lot of ot wasn't, or it was natural evolutions of things I already use so I didn't have a elarning curve for it.
wake up rizzler, new skibidi jones just dropped
Lit! 🔥
no cap frfr
On God, let's get this ratioed. 👍
On god no god no cap
Fr fr skull emoji ong
Yeet is obviously just an English reflex of PIE *(H)yeh1-
What's it got to do with pie?
@@nyanuwu4209proto Indo European, common language root for many European languages
Maybe... But I'd bet it is actually more about a shared omomotopoetical origin for both.
IIRC, "yeeted" was made up on the fly by a celebrity in the context of a video game, and took off because it just works and fills a mostly empty semantic hole created by video game physics ;)
@@travcollierI thought yeet came from two vines where people where dancing saying ya yeet ya yeet then a short time later someone threw a water bottle in a crowded hallway and yelled yeet
@@BC-sn8im Maybe. The popularization I was exposed to was gaming related. There's often a bit of difference between what brought a work into (or back into) consciousness and usefulness that keeps it sticking around.
I laughed so hard I lost track of the video at the "snack/dish inflation" joke.
ChatGPT (o1-Preview) Thought for 8 seconds about the Pennsylvania vowel-merger question:
Identifying vowel merger
I’m piecing together the specific vowel merger migrating eastward across Pennsylvania, with younger generations no longer distinguishing between two vowels that their parents did.
Assessing vowel mergers
I’m figuring out vowel mergers in Pennsylvania. The cot-caught merger is advancing eastward. Probable mergers include don-dawn and on-awn.
Weighing various mergers
I’m piecing together the 'caught-cot' merger in Western Pennsylvania, noting its shift eastward. The 'salary-celery' merger seems implausible, while the 'short o' and 'long o' merger, and the 'hoarse-horse' merger in American English appear unlikely.
Yes, the linguist is likely referring to the "cot-caught" merger, a phonological phenomenon where the vowels in words like "cot" and "caught" are pronounced the same. This merger involves the collapse of the low back vowels /ɑ/ (as in "cot") and /ɔ/ (as in "caught") into a single vowel sound.
In many traditional dialects of English spoken by older generations in Pennsylvania, these vowels are distinct. However, younger speakers are increasingly pronouncing them the same way. This change is spreading eastward across the state, meaning that areas which previously maintained a distinction between these vowels are now experiencing the merger among the younger population.
Why is this happening?
Language Change Over Time: Languages naturally evolve, and vowel sounds are particularly susceptible to change.
Influence of Media and Mobility: Increased exposure to different dialects through media and greater geographic mobility can accelerate such changes.
Social Identity: Younger speakers may adopt speech patterns that align with broader regional or national norms, sometimes moving away from traditional local pronunciations.
Implications:
Generational Differences: Parents and their children might pronounce words differently, leading to misunderstandings or perceptions of "incorrect" pronunciation.
Dialect Leveling: This merger contributes to the reduction of regional dialect differences, leading to a more homogenized American English pronunciation.
Example Words Affected:
"Cot" and "Caught"
"Don" and "Dawn"
"Stock" and "Stalk"
Reference in Linguistics:
Low Back Merger: This phenomenon is well-documented in sociolinguistics as the low back merger or the cot-caught merger.
Studies and Surveys: Linguistic surveys like the Atlas of North American English have mapped the spread of this merger across different regions.
Conclusion:
The vowel merger spreading east across Pennsylvania is the cot-caught merger, leading to younger speakers not differentiating between vowels that their parents do distinguish.
I'm old enough to be highly annoyed by the new usage of "out of pocket." y'all discounting our generational trauma of being gouged by insurance.
I assume you're talking about the figurative "out of.pocket" meaning the money you had in your pocket is no longer there, like "I paid for it out of my own pocket," versus the use in business English, meaning unavailable. God only knows what "out of office" did to make them leave. Anyway, I have an auto-reply email from 18 years ago with that phrase, so it's at least that old. I'm new to the channel, and maybe it's been done already, but I'd be very interested in some material on business English.
@@Skinsoot , I didn't know that was being used in business anywhere. I think if people are saying that it is because they picked it up elsewhere. Where I work, it is still out of office. Maybe that's partly because then we can write OOO.
I paid for it out of pocket. Is there another use of that phrase? If there is idk it.
@@johnd5931 Nowadays it's often used to mean "out of line", like if somebody says something messed up and uncalled for.
Yeah, this one's weird to me when I hear it. I always knew "out of pocket" to mean "not available." I get that automatic sense of wrongness when I hear it used now. Guess some Gen A heard their parents say it so much they decided to try it on for size. LOL
*pushes up glasses*
Feels weird to be trying out an um actually on my first viewing of your channel, but NPC is NOT a video game term. Originates with tabletop roleplaying in the 1970s.
Anyway, New Subscriber!
Npc is definitely a video game term also. While it may have been invented earlier, it's use is applied in the same way in video games. And video games are just digital role playing games. Lol
@@about99ninjas56
You're right. That was by design. Many video game developers from the 70s to today have been inspired by tabletop RPGs and adapted those game systems into video games. It was and still is one of the easiest ways to get into coding.
That's why VG RPGs are such a staple and have been since the industry started.
So many of the same terms used in TTRPGs made their way into VGRPGs.
It's also literally from Video Games. Most likely because in both tabletop games and video games, it's literally the same concept; a "Non-Playable Character".
This is like claiming "Pong is actually not a vdeo game. It's a tabletop game."
@@JamesR624
I did not claim it was only in tabletop... Just that tabletop is where the label is from and was adopted by video games.
I definitely misspoke here. I didn't mean to imply that the term isn't in use in video games. Of course it is. I meant that its origin is in tabletop, that's all.
"Bye Felicia" had a nostalgia quality at that time...and I feel like it was largely driven by Millennials who grew up watching Friday as kids.
yes and then got further immortalized in the video of the guy who pushes his gf off the bungie ledge when she says if he does they are breaking up lol
Remember when a switch used to mean a pocket knife? Pepperidge Farm remembers
Not quite sure how you do it but I always find your videos so entertaining while also feeling like I'm actually learning something. I think my brain just likes how distilled the information you provide is.
@@TheMidnightGoose thank you! That’s exactly what I’m going for
small correction. Yeet didn’t exactly spawn from videogames but actually a viral video from vine where a woman was holding a soda can, launches it at a high school crowd in a hallway, and shouts “yeet!” as a random onomatopoeia. It was funny and viral and is the reason yeet means to chuck or throw something.
Other than that, great video
I came here to say this. People started referencing the vine whenever they threw things, by shouting yeet just like the woman in the video. I'd label it as an interjection rather than an onomatopoeia, at least when it was first popularized.
Here's some fake gen α slang using the remixed-older-phrases formula. Bonus challenge: guess the etymology before reading the full definition:
1. Straw: "Netflix cancelling the only sitcom I even bother watching is fully straw." Adj. meaning frustrating, pushing beyond a limit.
2. Otters: "That album that charli xcx just dropped is straight otters." Adj. meaning exceptional, impressive.
3. Under (V): "I was undering the algorithm by splicing emojis into the spicier words." V. meaning to navigate undetected.
4. Kafufu (N): "Whatever Language Jones was saying about reduplication was a big kafufu to me." N. meaning something incomprehensible.
ETYMOLOGIES:
1. From the idiom "The last straw" (from the earlier idiom "the straw that broke the camel's back")
2. From the earlier slang "outta sight"
3. From the phrase "flying under the radar"
4. From the word "confusing"
Kafufu from covfefe???
For 4 I was thinking "kerfuffle" (which I just learned this very moment is not actually "kerfluffle." My life is a lie ._. )
@@languagejones UA-cam's UI gives me the option on your comment to "Translate to English". Hilarious!
The example sentence made me think 'undering' was from 'undermining'
@@languagejones Nah, think more along the lines of the breakdown word "delulu" from delusional.
This is more intentional than previous.
Trying to be random and different, ends up being lame.
I find it interesting how the slang used in the early-mid 2010’s (yeet, on fleek, glow up, bussin) have specific associated videos/media to go along with them, whereas most of the new or revived slang has very little in terms of a popularized usage. Just think it speaks to the fleeting impact of “virality”
Adhd his only some sick like bussing is the only that stuck
As an old man, shouting at the clouds i find that a lot of these new funky phrases drive me doolally tap.
😆
"Old man yells at cloud"
Classic, good reference 😂
As a southern US resident, I like the enhancement of 'finna' that indicates you aren't just fixing to do something, but you're fixing to go somewhere. "Finnago," as in "I'm finnago Kroger's, ya'll need anything?" And we've been saying that for over a century, I'm pretty sure.
Finnago falls only just short in my admiration to the southernism of "fersee" as a measure of distance (to go as far- or 'fer'- as one can see from this point). Used in the southern Appalachians to indicate the next ridge over. Two fersees is the next ridge and then one more. Half a fersee is the valley between here and the ridge.
@HannibalKing-e7e Both cultures use it and it comes from common origins. Neither took it from the other, and neither owns it. Language and dialect can be shared.
Iirc this comes from Scottish dialects of English, which ended up shared with black English in the south due to class commonalities. I might be wrong about that, but I recall this having roots in English dialects pre-America.
@@peterlarson233 Yeah, there's a lot of crossover between "Celtic Fringe" and African American speech patterns. Not identical, but enough common roots to see similar patterns in many cases.
The joke about inflation got me giggling like a tiny child. Thanks for the great video!
Giggling like a tiny child that understands inflation
Everything goes back to Cab Calloway.
That guy was fucking awesome lol
I was talking to my husband about a song and said, "the young people might call it a Bop, isn't it crazy that old-timey word is being used again?" He said, "Bop? I've never heard that word being used to describe a song, it's old slang AND new slang?"
He is 53 (Gen X). I am 39 (Millennial). I may have only known it was a slang word from the 30's or 40's because I've been a musician most my life. He skipped knowing the word when it was used in past decades, and hasn't heard it yet in today's time.
Oh you don’t want to know the new meaning that’s been placed on it by TikTok…
I came back to this video after months because I realized I wasn't subscribed
As a teacher, you missed some of the most popular ones: "Cook", "Cooked", "Yapper/Yapping" "Left no Crumbs", "Zesty", "Lock in", "Brain Rot", "On God", "Bro" (degendered version).
Precursor to "Left no crumbs" was "ate"
@@angelaa7388 Yes I know that, but it's still worth a mention. A lot of younger kids don't even use "ate" anymore.
On god makes me cringe.
I kind of like cooked and have started using that as well.
Also your name is principal skinner and I've been watching Unlimited Steam as background noise while I sleep for like the last month, which are two totally unrelated things and you may not even know what im talking about, but its good to see you... Skinman.
(Ps: in my mid 30s for context)
~20:38 I believe the origin of the word "yeet" as an onomatopoeia for throwing something originated in a vine of someone throwing a CD, and was popularized a bit later by another vine where someone is given an empty soda can and says "This bitch empty, YEET!" while throwing it - that vine is certainly where I picked it up.
I made a comment already, but I think the true origin comes from a foreign knock-off Land Before Time cartoon that became a very popular meme at the time, and one of the characters making a weird little noise in their dialog that people thought was hilarious, so they started imitating it.
@@vectorwolf Oh yeah I remember that video lol, not sure if it can definitively be tied to the use of yeet while throwing things though, seems like it might be a coincidence.
@@vectorwolf The "yeeeee" meme? Feels unlikely, since it doesn't sound a lot like yeet in practice. Then again, everyone seems to think tony soprano says 'gabagool' when I absolutely 100% can't hear any L at the end (just gabagoo).
Pleasingly though, it does sound like the opposite action of "yoink".
@@marasmusine it's a very appropriate sort of word, and has become a permanent part of my lexicon, for sure.
This is quickly becoming my favorite channel atm, I love the way you break down language and I have BEEN saying that most of what people call "gen alpha slang" predates them by a lot
its very validating to hear that from such an articulate and understanding person, honestly it makes me wish more people thought like you did about not only language but other things in general
Im glad to see someone who is so genuinely mindful and thoughtful about such overlooked subjects
"Skibidi Bop" is a lyric from "Just a Gigalo" by Van Halen, and probably from scat singing well before that, so it's not a novel word either. Just refreshed. Great video!
Considering where most "new slang" comes from, I will just assume Skibidi is black slang from the 1970s.
I definitely mention that pathway in the video, but it's unclear whether it applies to skibidi in particular, unlike no cap, on god, etc.
Did not expect a Thomas Pynchon reference, which reminds me . . . still waiting for that bookshelf tour
@@languagejones MC Skibadee (RIP) was an amazing UK jungle/drum and bass MC. Amazing flow.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MC_Skibadee
I forgot from which song, but skibbidy came from some skat singing that later was used in a mashup song that got popular on tiktok
@@deddrz2549 The main cultural touchstone for Skibbidy seems to be a show called Skibbidy Toilet. I don't know if that's the origin, but it seems to be the populariser.