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3 panel meme. First panel: “I made a new internet slang”. Second panel: “New or misused AAVE?” Third panel: “Misused AAVE”. :::
the other 20% is either 4chan incel language or something trump tweeted in 2017
When my son was a younger teen, I’d look up the cool new slang words, and casually throw them into conversations with him and his friends. I never tried to actually use them correctly. He’d groan and roll his eyes. His friends would laugh and think his dad was a nerd.
One time I said a word wrong and they all laughed. Soon they were saying it as a joke. Then it became a word they just used.
I never saw it used online, so I don’t think I made a change in slang usage anywhere else except for a small group of middle schoolers. But I find it funny how it became accepted so quickly. And then forgotten just as quick.
I LOVE HYPERLOCAL SHIBBOLETH
What was it?
You know when you think something is swell? Call it “cool” instead.
AAVE?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African-American_Vernacular_English
Had to look that one up myself.
Since language is an ever changing thing it can’t really be misused, it can only evolve.
I am not sure that’s true, language can absolutely be misused, when an individual uses a word in a way nobody recognizes, it fails to function as language and is worth considering genuinely misused. It’s only when a “misuse” gains enough traction that people can effectively use it to communicate that it is an evolution rather than a misuse.
The point is that the language is about use, e.g. getting a concept across, and it can absolutely fail or be applied incorrectly.
Take for example if a variety of mugs are on a table and I wanted the red mug. If I said “pass me the green mug”, that would be a misuse of “green” as meaning red, and it would fail to communicate, as long as there are other mugs and my meaning cannot be inferred.
If there is clearly only one mug, a person might think I was mistaken or colorblind and still get my intended meaning, but it would still be considered a misuse of “green”.
If enough people used “green” to mean red, maybe because my family thought the mistake was funny and adopted “green” to mean red as an in-joke, it might grow out of being a misuse into a new meaning.
The same thing is happening when white children misuse AAVE and generate slang, “gyatt” for example meaning “god” as in “gyatt damn” becomes mistakenly applied to mean a butt because of misunderstanding about how gyatt was originally used. The misuse becomes new slang, but it could have easily remained an obscure and forgotten misuse if it didn’t catch-on with enough people such that it took on a new meaning.
If enough people used “green” to refer to “red” objects, the meaning of the word would change.
See: inversion of the meaning of the word “literally”
See: inversion of the meaning of the word “literally”
That’s a great example of a word being misused. If the way a word is used makes its meaning less clear than before, it’s being misused. Since “literally” can now mean “figuratively,” you don’t know how a person means it without additional information. If a new word came about to mean the opposite of “figuratively,” all well and good, but without it, meaning is being objectively obfuscated. Another word that suffered this fate is “nonplussed,” which means “being so surprised and confused a person doesn’t know how to react,” but is commonly used to mean “unperturbed,” its opposite. Because of this, it’s usually recommended to just not use it at all, because nobody can be sure what it’s supposed to mean.
This can even happen to technical terms, for example bimonthly now has both the original meaning of once every 2 months, and also means semimonthly, twice a month.
In other words it’s completely worthless as a word because it fails to specify between conflicting meanings.
“Biweekly” and “biannually” have the same problem. I guess the terms have stuck because the dates they’re referring to are usually specified as well. It’s not much help to only know that something will happen at some point within a week, month, or year. “Okay, but when, exactly?”
I was imagining in my example that “green” might be adopted to mean red only in certain contexts, like used ironically or humorously to mean red, not in a way that erased or overrode the word’s general meaning as green. This is to match the symmetry of misused words like gyatt that continue to have their original meaning and use, but get warped into a new meaning through misuse and then adoption of that misuse in a certain context, such as among white children on Fortnite.
As opposed to a complete inversion or change of the meaning of the word such that “green” would no longer mean green anymore but only mean red (this of course could still happen, it just wasn’t the kind of case I was trying to illustrate).
Alternative logic. It has to be misused to evolve.
Words have meanings and when they diverge from the original definition, I refer to that as misuse (personal opinion). I don’t think misusing words is a bad thing. I’m just giving my input here.
I still maintain that the only good thing Trump ever did for anyone was give us covfefe.
And hamberders
Tack on Tim Apple to the list, too.
top kek
Whenever I read: AAVE, I like to imagine it’s pronounced like the halo theme.
