Things I Love About Youth Talk:
• Capitalization to emphasize A Word Or Phrase
• The use of ™ to show Importance™
• Commas,,, used as,,, an ellipsis,,,,
• ran dom s p aci ng to show a choked or strangled sort of tone
• Cut-offs mid sentence
• saying that they love something, or that something is doing its best, even if it’s an inanimate object
• Dramatizing every sentence (instead of saying “Oh, she’s pretty!” One would say “U would let her kill me and say thank you.”)
• random capitalization in the middle of a sentENCE TO EMPHASIZE A RISING, MORE EMOTIONAL TONE
• vague one word answers in response to a picture
• Mood/same/me
• Jokes where the only way to understand it is if you’ve seen two other vines, a tweet, and four Tumblr posts from 2012
• Noticing details about a freaky picture and acting like it’s completely normal
• The opposite: seeing a stupid picture and losing it in responseFeel free to add others
you can make nearly any object into a good insult if you put ‘you absolute’ in front of it
example: you absolute coat hanger
as well u can just add ‘ed’ to any object and it’s sounds like you were really drunk
example: i was absolutely coat hangered last night
Meanwhile, “utter” works for the first (e.g., “you utter floorboard”) but somehow “utterly” doesn’t seem to work as well for the second (“I was utterly floorboarded”).
Utterly doesn’t work for drunk because it’s the affix for turning random objects into terms for *shocked*, obviously.
… huh. I thought that might just be the similarity to “floored”, and yet “I was utterly coat hangered” does seem to convey something similar.
I have to tell you, I am utterly sandwiched at this discovery.
Completely makes the phrase mean “super tired”.
“God, it’s been a long week, I am completely coat-hangered.”
Something is
Something is wrong with our language
Is it a glitch or a feature?
Feature
we don’t have anything like this in French and it offers a range of expressibility that I wish we could properly translate back. it is a feature, i concur
you can make nearly any object into a good insult if you put ‘you absolute’ in front of it
example: you absolute coat hanger
as well u can just add ‘ed’ to any object and it’s sounds like you were really drunk
example: i was absolutely coat hangered last night
Meanwhile, “utter” works for the first (e.g., “you utter floorboard”) but somehow “utterly” doesn’t seem to work as well for the second (“I was utterly floorboarded”).
Utterly doesn’t work for drunk because it’s the affix for turning random objects into terms for *shocked*, obviously.
… huh. I thought that might just be the similarity to “floored”, and yet “I was utterly coat hangered” does seem to convey something similar.
I have to tell you, I am utterly sandwiched at this discovery.
at what point in history do you think americans stopped having british accents
Actually, Americans still have the original British accent. We kept it over time and Britain didn’t. What we currently coin as a British accent developed in England during the 19th century among the upper class as a symbol of status. Historians often claim that Shakespeare sounds better in an American accent.
whAT THE FUCK
I’m too tired for this
Always add in the video that according to linguists, Native southern drawl is a slowed down British.
T’ be or not t’be, y’all.
Fun fact: Same thing happened with the French accent. French Canadians still have the original French accent from the 15th century.
Êt’e ou n’pô zêt’e, vous z’auts.
I’ve been trying to find this post for months. I’m freakishly obsessed with this and want the truth of what early colonists sounded like.
New hobby idea: using phrases that sound like down-home folksy expressions you learned from your grandma but are actually just nonsense you just made up
– that man really salts my melon!
– you know what they say, it takes a bushel of corn to feed one chicken
– a louse will live on any head it lands on
– don’t put down a salt lick and say you ain’t got cows
– there’s a guy who eats half the berries and says the pie shell’s too big
– like digging a pond and hoping for ducks
This was supposed to be a joke and all but as a southerner, these still make sense.
its weird these don’t mean anything but you can still kind of intuit what they would mean if they were things people actually said.
what studying languages is like
latin: words like ‘yes’ and ‘no’ aren’t important. memorize these 3000 different ways to talk about killing people though because you will use them
greek: hello naughty students it’s participle time
egyptian: ancient pictionary
french: pronouncing every letter is for chumps
german: let’s combine every other word together to create the U L T I M A T E F R A N K E N W O R D
mandarin: lol whats a verb tense
spanish: LOL WHAT ISN’T A VERB TENSE
a lot of prescriptive linguists (the fancy term for snotty english majors, faux-talgic baby boomers, racist gatekeepers, and other subdivisions of the language police) like to shame The Youth for lazy capitalization and punctuation, but the interesting thing is that most young ppl i know who build their lives around texting are actually pretty damn deliberate about their language choices
“u” and “you” show degrees of closeness w/ your partner; using punctuation at the end of a reply text indicates tone; capitalizing certain words in the middle of the sentence is for Emphasis; sometimes we’re sloppy and sometimes we make mistakes but there is a real grammar to internet communication because by “grammar” i mean a “code of language rules that society agrees upon in order to create meaning”, and that is the opposite of being lazy
(tumblr absolutely has such a grammar and you can tell when someone’s not fluent)
the old guard is passionately defending a pure linguistic territory that we don’t want anymore, it’s not useful enough for 21st century relationships dependent on the subtleties of texts
this is actually really important, since text based communication lacks the ability to indicate meaning through tonal variations, it’s really so smart and impressive that we’re modifying our written grammar to show emphasis and differences in meanings and tone
The proclamation rings from the tall Ivory walls, “You can’t have meaning where we find none!” the huddled masses reply with a soft chant of “smh”