Callie Holtermann writes for the NY Times (archived) about a linguist who posts online as Etymology Nerd and who was mentioned here last year:
Adam Aleksic has been thinking about seggs. Not sex, but seggs — a substitute term that took off a few years ago among those trying to dodge content-moderation restrictions on TikTok. Influencers shared stories from their “seggs lives” and spoke about the importance of “seggs education.”
Lots of similarly inventive workarounds have emerged to discuss sensitive or suggestive topics online. This phenomenon is called algospeak, and it has yielded terms like “cornucopia” for homophobia and “unalive,” a euphemism for suicide that has made its way into middle schoolers’ offline vocabulary.
These words roll off the tongue for Mr. Aleksic, a 24-year-old linguist and content creator who posts as Etymology Nerd on social media. Others may find them slightly bewildering. But, as he argues in a new book, “Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language,” these distinctly 21st-century coinages are worthy of consideration by anyone interested in the forces that mold our shifting lexicon.
[…]Mr. Aleksic has been dissecting slang associated with Gen Z on social media since 2023. In wobbly, breathless videos that are usually about a minute long, he uses his undergraduate degree in linguistics from Harvard to explain the spread of terms including “lowkey” and “gyat.” (If you must know, the latter is a synonym for butt.)
There’s much more at the link, including a discussion of “rizz” (which we talked about in 2023); I was curious about the odd-looking “gyat” and googled, but I’m not convinced by the etymology given here: “Girl Your Ass Is Thick.”
The Wikipedia version is spelled Gyatt, with a somewhat more plausible etymology.
It is indeed somewhat more plausible.
Is “unalive” now restricted to suicide? I’ve seen it as a general synonym for “kill.”
I wondered about that too, but I figured I’m too out of it to have an opinion.
Yeah, to me “unalive” is also a synonym for “kill”; the collocation for suicide I’m familiar with is “unalive myself.”
I guess 60s-speak was just as lame. It did change much more slowly, so there’s that.
Yep, unalive definitely just means “kill.”
The goal isn’t to charm people with your wit; the goal is to escape the censorship on TikTok that doesn’t allow you to talk about suicide in particular and, I think, death in general.
60s-speak was just as lame
Like, nothing was ever as good again as Beatnik-speak.
Dig it, daddy-o!
do we have a link or cite for a good explanation for the olds of what the youngs mean by thick or thic or thicc or thik or thikk in various extended senses and if spelling variation is meaningful signal versus random noise?
i’m not sure of a cite, but:
it’s all “thick” in the sense of callipygian (broadly, also including thighs and hips), partly as a politeness-driven replacement for “phat”/”fat” under the influence of both heightened stigmatization of fatness and the establishment that having a noticeable ass has become desirable within increasingly rigid beauty standards.
aside from censorship-filter evasion (as part of a set with “succ”, “fuq”, etc), the common explanation is that the “-cc” ending originates with Crips’ practice of spelling anything with a /k/ using the organization’s initial, and specifically avoiding “ck” (which could be taken as “Crip Killer”). whether or not that’s documentable, i would guess that some of the “-k” / “-kk” usage is people who want to avoid making what’s understood as a Crip signal, either because of conflicting affiliations or to avoid appearing aligned. but i think a big piece of it all is that /k/ (like /f/) is a key node of u.s. subcultural play with spelling.
So is “callipygian” a Crip-friendly respelling of “kallipygean”?
I had never heard of Crip ck-avoidance before. The only other orthographic avoidance practice I know of is the Orthodox Jewish holy name avoidance in various contexts, typically final יה which is euphemized as י׳. What others are there?
Crip ck-avoidance
We achieve this in Welsh by not using the letter k at all.
I had not previously realised that this came about just because we are so damn cool.
Just wondering if any language (other than TikToki) actually says “make unalive” for “kill.”
Oti-Volta (thank you for asking) has both factitive suffixes (as with Kusaal vʋ’ʋg “make/come alive” beside vʋe “be alive”) and reversive suffixes (as in Kusaal yɛ “put on clothes”, yɛɛg “take off clothes”), but the reversive suffix can’t be added to stative verb stems like “be alive”, and cannot follow a factitive suffix, so neither “make [be unalive]” nor “un[make be alive]” can be produced by verb derivation.
[You can, of course, say something like M kɛ ka o da vʋeya “I’ve caused him not to be alive”, but that’s a different matter.]
The more straightforward “make dead” is not unheard of, of course. (E.g. mortificare.) The problem seems to be with placement of negative morphemes like “un.”
We achieve this in Welsh by not using the letter k at all.
I had not previously realised that this came about just because we are so damn cool.
Very Celtic, and not at all kewl.
Weeell… not morphologically, but Biblical Hebrew has the piʿel form of ḥyh, ‘to let live’, which negated means ‘to kill’, לֹא תְחַיֶּה loʾ ṯᵊhạyye ‘you will not let live’ and לֹא יְחַיֶּה loʾ yᵊḥayye ‘he will/would not let live’, Ex. 22:17 (witches), Deut. 20:16, Sam1 17:9 and 11 (genocide), Job 36:6 (the wicked).
totmachen was used for “kill” in colloquial German long before the Internet, but I haven’t seen unlebendig machen or (ver)unlebendigen. They probably exist as calques from English on the net, but I don’t want to spoil my weekend by searching for them.
(Addendum: the unmarked verb töten “kill” is also a transparent causative based on the adjective tot “dead”.)
Kusaal kpi “die” and kʋ “kill”, with cognates everywhere in Oti-Volta, must surely be related as simplex and causative (there’s no velar versus labial-velar contrast before rounded vowels in Western Oti-Volta: cf kum “death.”)
But if so, the derivational process involved seems to antedate proto-Oti-Volta. Nateni has been described as having a causative suffix -wa, but the only case I have found where the suffix appears with an actual -w- is in tōwá “make carry on the head”, from tōó “carry on the head.” Mind you, Miyobe (not Oti-Volta, but closely related) has kpò, imperfective kpúlɛ̀ “die” beside kpù, imperfective kòbú “kill”, which suggests some kind of labial suffix in “kill.” Maybe.
Nigerian English has dead meaning “kill.” I suspect it may be a calque from an African language, but if it is, I don’t know which one.
@hans
noun + umlaut + (e)n
schänden, färben, köpfen
adj + umlaut + (e)n
töten, säubern, glätten
Is it clear that Wunsch is a back-formation from the verb wünschen, even though the pattern is the same (https://www.dwds.de/wb/Wunsch seems to imply this for an earlier stage)? Is the “football” sense of köpfen a calque from English?
I don’t think this reflects an African language source directly. I don’t know the most relevant languages, but FWIW, Yoruba, for example, has kú “die” versus pa (i.e. /k͡pa/) “kill”, and all the languages I do know have separate lexemes in that way.
I supect it’s more the Nigerian Pidgin pattern of frequent use of labile verbs which express both a change of state and the corresponding causative, just like e.g. English “dry” or “heat.” (Though in this particular case Nigerian Pidgin has day and kil.) It is relevant that in Pidgin, “adjectives” are actually stative verbs (so you say a taya “I am-tired”, with no copula), and they double as their own corresponding change-of-state verbs (a de taya “I’m getting tired.”)
The labile use of change-of-state verbs as their own causatives is very common in West African languages. In Kusaal, it’s pretty much the rule (e.g. tʋlig “heat up”), but that is probably the consequence of a historical loss of the original causative suffix when added after the factitive suffix in Western Oti-Volta; in contrast, Waama, for example, regularly distinguishes the forms, as with e.g. báarì “be thin”, bariki “get thin”, barikire “make thin.” (cf Kusaal banl “be thin”, banlig “get/make thin.”)
“totmachen” as a transparent causative doesn’t involve the euphemistic/evasive vibe of “unalive” which is what makes it noteworthy.
No:
“Because in Germanic an IE suffix sk̑ seems to be present, like in Old Indic vā́ñchati, Germanic *wunski- [the verb] and *wunskō [the noun] could have been formed from a lost verb corresponding to this [vā́ñchati].”
Actually, the IE zero grade in the Germanic versions is much more straightforward (*wn-sk̑é-) than the stressed lengthened grade of the Vedic verb; long vowels as a somewhat murky tool of derivational morphology really took off in Indic.
Is it clear that Wunsch is a back-formation from the verb wünschen, even though the pattern is the same (https://www.dwds.de/wb/Wunsch seems to imply this for an earlier stage)?
That’s not what DWDS is saying. It says that Wunsch seems to imply a lost sk-verb PGmc. *wunskan, while the attested verbs (German wünschen, English wish are denominal causatives in -jan, I.e. formed according to the pattern we are discussing.
Edit: Ninja’d by DM
Is the “football” sense of köpfen a calque from English?
I have no reason to think otherwise.
@JWB: Sure; I was just responding to DE’s examples for causative formations.
@hans, de
Thanks, that was confusing me…
Ninja’d by DM
Does anyone know the history of this sense of ninja? The OED (2003 entry) just has “Chiefly with adverb: to act or move in a manner similar to a ninja” (1992 “I leapt up, ninja’d over to Gav’s bed and wheeched the duvet off,” I. Banks, Crow Road vii. 160), which makes sense, but the extension to ‘preempt by posting first’ is not obvious.
Green’s doesn’t have that sense either. However, I believe it’s derived from another sense that originated in the early 2000s in MMORGs, referring to characters who would poach valuable drops from kills. Naturally, the characters involved didn’t need to be literal members of ninja character classes, but the metaphor of speedy, unseen (or at least unexpected) action is fairly natural.
One of the earliest usages I can find online is from this (extremely self-important) book by Peter Ludlow,* published in 2007.
* Ludlow appears to have only one previous mention on Language Hat, which was related to his evangelism of Chomsky’s ideas and bore out Ludlow’s typically immoderate self regard and dickishness. Apparently, he has more recently been an evangelist for the (probably even that much dumber) idea of replacing the bureaucratic apparatus of the nation-state with a blockchain-based accountability system.
Urban Dictionary helps some. The connection is with quick stealthiness, and then to someone sneaking in a reply before you did. The first quote is from 2005.
I learned “jinx!”, and I’m sticking to it.
Bluebottle in the Goon Show from 1950s BBC used to say “I’ve been deaded!”.
“You dirty rotten swine, you’ve deaded me!”
My all-time favourite Bluebottle line occurs when (as usual) he is reciting his own stage directions, in the course of which he describes himself as wearing “a rough seaman’s itchy jersey.”
Apropos:
“I’m famous Eccles.”
“But I’ve never heard of you.”
“You’ve heard of Clapham Common, haven’t you?”
“Yes …”
*You mind what you say.”
I have always thought that Eccles is in fact Enkidu. It all fits. The identification of Bluebottle with Gilgamesh is, admittedly, more controversial. However, it is clear that “Gilgamesh” was originally Bilgamesh in Sumerian, which removes much of the apparent difficulty.
I know I’ve seen some discussions of the origin of ninja’d. I tried to do a Usenet search and indeed most of the earlier cites are about ninja looting in MMOs (the earliest I found, from 2000, specifically used the phrase “ninja looting” in other comments).
Vaguely recall saying emu’d on some forums – don’t think that ever significantly took off…
(The Wiktionary cite on the verb ninja in this meaning mentions a Blue Emu, and now I wonder if that’s related. There’s no obvious source on the citation.)
EDIT: did some Google searching; the oldest example of “ninja’d” in the forum meaning that I managed to find was from May 2005.