Where do slang terms/contemporary idiosyncracies come from?
2 2018-01-10 by PMmeYOURrareCONTENT
It may not be strictly conspirational (or it may), but has it ever bugged anyone else where slang words and idiosyncracies (like specific word inflections etc) come from and how it's possible that they get so very popular and widespread? It defies all reason.
Who is the first person to come up with such terms? I often see people using slang words. But I don't remember ever knowing anyone who successfully created a neologism of any sort that became used even inside his social circle.
It's like slang words simply exist and people first don't know them, and then they do know them.
And while slang or certain idiosyncracies is implicitly "cool", creating neologisms that nobody understands is kind of the opposite and makes you look weird.
So where do these come from? Someone with the power to do so has to be spreading them somehow, from somewhere. Right? I can't imagine it being purely "viral". Because if it was, after all, it should be easier in life to observe instances where new words are "generated". More importantly though, you would then expect slang to only be meaningful in small social circles, not across entire populations (except maybe for a few exceptions).
Maybe it's about celebrities/famous people using them? And others adapt those? Does that sound right-ish? But then, how do they come up with them and how do they know they will be accepted beforehand? It's almost some kind of black magic lol.
It's so very strange.
27 comments
1 Ninjakick666 2018-01-10
I invented the term "dyking out"...
1 PMmeYOURrareCONTENT 2018-01-10
Really? Do tell me more about how that went.
1 Space__Stuff 2018-01-10
People fagged out about it.
1 PMmeYOURrareCONTENT 2018-01-10
lol
1 Mecanatron 2018-01-10
I would imagine that most of them are born in (and spread through) the different tribes of youth culture before permeating mainstream pop-culture.
A kid into hip-hop and a kid into metal can sound totally different, whilst living minutes apart. Different accent, different slang terms etc.
1 PMmeYOURrareCONTENT 2018-01-10
That's true, but how precisely does it happen?
1 Mecanatron 2018-01-10
One kid says it (usually the cool one), another kid emulates them.. and so it spreads. When you have a large & sociable youth tribe full of impressionable kids wanting to fit in , you can imagine how quickly it takes hold.
Sometimes (such as in the instance of 'Yo'), they stretch back hundreds of years, often nearly dying out only to be resurrected by a new culture.
1 PMmeYOURrareCONTENT 2018-01-10
Mh figures I wouldn't know much about it, never been the cool one. Still seems kinda top-to-bottom distribution. Hmmm. And who defines what kid is cool, right? Maybe the cool kid is nothing else than the young version of the charismatic politician who later rules the land.
1 Mecanatron 2018-01-10
I think you may be going a little deep now.. back up a bit, we're only talking about the birth of slang words :)
I'm not sure there's a conspiracy behind Waaazzzupppp!!!... Something something budweiser?
1 PMmeYOURrareCONTENT 2018-01-10
Who knows, who knows. But after all, the psychopaths that rule the world were once kids too, don't ya think?
1 Mecanatron 2018-01-10
Well i know none of our lot went on to rule the world... but then we could never claim credit for any slang going old school viral, so maybe you're onto something!
1 ignoremsmedia 2018-01-10
Like Cockney Rhyming Slang?
"Just going down the rub a dub to have a dog's eye with the cheese and kisses". (Romantic night out with the wife.)
That's kind of alienating for non Cockney folk.
1 Mecanatron 2018-01-10
Exactly.
And its not just cockneys that have rhyming slang, although they are the best known for it.
I've heard rhyming slang from other places such as Newcastle in the north of UK. I've even heard some in smaller towns in Ireland.
Quite a bizarre form of language play.
1 MoronToTheKore 2018-01-10
It’s really not that strange. Nobody needs to “push” certain fads or phrases for them to become a big deal. Note how quickly most fads, both linguistic and not, come into being and fade out.
1 PMmeYOURrareCONTENT 2018-01-10
Be that as it may, I'm still curious where they come from.
1 MoronToTheKore 2018-01-10
Nowhere in particular. If you’re interested, you could google how linguistic fads come into being. It’s probably a fascinating stew of non-linguistic factors and geographical identity, mostly.
1 PMmeYOURrareCONTENT 2018-01-10
I did a quick read on Wikipedia, but didn't find much more than them being called a "linguistic phenomenon". Hmm.
1 MoronToTheKore 2018-01-10
I’m actually surprised Wikipedia doesn’t have information about it.
I’m sure the articles about memes and such would have something more?
1 PMmeYOURrareCONTENT 2018-01-10
Gotta check out someday, feeling too lazy right now. Good idea tho, memes are very similar in concept actually.
1 MoronToTheKore 2018-01-10
The very same concept, really.
1 Space__Stuff 2018-01-10
I've thought about this before. I believe there is much more to language and than most people grasp. It interests me as well how certain words, terms, phrases ect. came to be popular. I don't think all of them were by coincidence. If words have weight, there could potentially be implications for certain words to be commonly used. Check out the rice experiment. Truthstream media just made a video about it. More so intent I guess than just language, but still. Interesting as hell.
1 PMmeYOURrareCONTENT 2018-01-10
Hmm I am not sure I buy into the rice experiment thing and the video kinda triggers a few red flags for me.
But yeah I totalyl agree it's interesting as hell. And I am pretty sure not all of them were coincidence too. Come think about it, what does coincidence even mean? Isn't that kind of a cop-out in terms of explanation?
1 bradok 2018-01-10
I think you might want to look into internet meme culture for a part of your answer. With the internet, we have records so we can track terms down, forum posts, and videos, to try and find the origins of these things. With memes, it generally starts with one person saying or doing something in a small part of the web, maybe not even ironically at first. Sometimes it is picked up by others quickly, other times it percolates for weeks or months in different areas of the net, with a 2nd reference here, a 3rd there, each one closer than the last and connected by the different forums and sites each user overlaps with the other.
Eventually, it reaches critical mass, and the "main stream" of people get on board with it, and before you know it you have millions of people emulating something. I think with language you can take this trend but extrapolate it into a longer time frame...instead of days or weeks, we're looking at months or years of a word stewing in a small community, maybe a suburb, which spreads to other suburbs, then a city, then a county, a state, then an entire region and finally the whole country.
1 DukanullGatsuo5e 2018-01-10
Dost thou hold a curiosity towards thou language?
1 Fooomanchu 2018-01-10
You'd be surprised how far you can spread a good idea, just by repeating it a few times. Like this one: Reddit is a website run by corporate shills. We should leave soon probably.
1 murphy212 2018-01-10
Let’s try to do it.
To counteract the central planners’ dystopian ambition of an androgynous humanity, I propose to popularize the word philogyny (etymologically correct), with the following definition:
Meme
1 jeanfrancois111 2018-01-10
Control the language and you control the mind