Tiktok has been such a facilitator it’s unbelievable. Within a week or two a word I’ve never heard a single white person use will be a part of the average genZer’s/genAlpha’s lexicon. Plus they will then be called “meme words” 💀
I do not really care but something will always be uncomfortable about a 13 year old white kid saying rizz and gyatt in every other sentence.
God I fucking hate this term so much it's not even a word it's just onomatopoeia 💀 we already have plenty of terms for ass/booty/cake
Language evolves and changes and I'm aware things change between generations but like damn man this feels like a complete regression. I blame capitalism
Wait at the risk of sounding incredibly old and white gyatt means ass? I thought it was supposed to be like an alternate phonetic spelling of "Got Damn"
The etymology I'd always heard for "gyatt" was that the meaning went from the exclamation "got damn" itself, to something that might make one exclaim "got damn" -- namely, a big ole sexy bumbum
More than the word I hate the way it is used incessantly by children in TikTok comments whenever someone has a nice ass ("I GYATT to see it", "you GYATT to give it to her") just shut the fuck up already
It really is weird hearing American suburban white kids on TikTok talking like the inner city kids I went to school with when I lived in the US. It’s really irritating to hear black slang referred to as “gen Z slang”
Gen Z didn't even come up with most of it, it was Black Millennials 🙄 funny how they spent the last decade attributing everything to us yet can't seem to give credit where it's due
Can't wait for South African sayings to hit the streets of the Western world eventually lol. It's all over TikTok. Some cringe 16 year old named Kyle in the Midwest telling someone to voetsek lol. Or some kid going haibo instead of wtf. Or some kid trying to be sassy typing out mxm without knowing what it means or how to pronounce it. Some mom or dad saying eish wena.
A random side note is that I once coined sjoe as a gender-neutral pronoun for one of my conlangs — more specifically ⟨sjoe⟩ is one of the two standard ways of romanizing this word, but it's the romanization that I use by far the most often because it's ASCII friendly.
To quickly explain the etymology of the pronoun sjoe: it comes from sj- (root for 3S pronouns) + -oe (standard gender-neutral equivalent to -a / -e). I can go in more depth but I don't think that's necessary, you get the picture.
Anyways, after getting comfortable with using the word sjoe in my conlang, I even started sometimes using sjoe in English when referring to third-gender or non-binary characters from my conworld — I justified this practice by saying that the word sjoe was to many of these characters essentially a sacred and untranslatable mark of respect. And then when I started getting comfortable with using sjoe in English for fictional characters, I even started considering using sjoe for myself, because I'd already coined the word and I liked the sound of it and it's my conlang so I can do whatever the heck I please with it.
...And then one day I decided to look up "sjoe" on Wiktionary on a whim, just to see if this word happened by some off chance to coincidentally also be a real word used in any natural languages.
...
...Alright so it turns out that South Africans, through some bizarre twist of fate, apparently use sjoe as an interjection. Which means that South Africans — although the sjoe of my conlang is etymologically unrelated and not pronounced the same as the interjection sjoe — probably would've read the things I'd written about my conworld's characters as something like, "Phew! castrated whoo!-self as a teenager and became a choir singer, but due to rejection from whew!'s family ended up running away; sheesh! ended up finding a powerful sentient shield in a forest built by an ancient civilization, and with this shield wow! came to uncover all the secrets and conspiracies of yeesh!'s world..."
I ultimately decided against using sjoe for myself.
I honestly don't mind people saying things like "carry-okey". I am 100% capable of saying カラオケ with a flawless heiban pitch accent, with vowel and consonant qualities that would totally shock natives and make them do triple backflips out of excitement... But I'm also not going to just say "I was home alone so I did some カラオケ to my favorite songs while no-one could hear me." — the pronunciation of "karaoke" going to be anglicized in one way or another, and English does indeed have a limited set of phonemes and some number of phonotactic restrictions and so forth. Relevant for "carry-okey" is diaeresis and the checked vs free vowels.
Ultimately I don't think that "carry-okey" is any more "criminal" a pronunciation than Japanese people themselves saying, well, kara-ōkesʉtora — the Japanese tendency to epenthesize extra vowels in loan words to satisfy that language's phonotactic restrictions is literally optimality theory 101 type stuff. But we place higher expectations on Americans to say things "correctly" basically just because they're Americans: this judgment is divorced from all that boring academic linguistics stuff, and is more just about preconceptions and prejudices and engaging in the social activity of dunking on how dumb Americans are...
...I dunno, I grew up speaking two languages myself, English and Norwegian. I'm already very used to Americanizing my own name and place names in my local area and things like that, to my relatives who only speak English, as well as Norwegianizing the names of relatives and place names in the United States. My mom actually argues with me on occasion that I Americanize my surname "the wrong way", because her pronunciation of our surname tries to approximate the original Norwegian pronunciation as much as possible, whereas my pronunciation is a lot more orthographic and "casual". And I just tell mom when that topic comes up that I'm the one of us two who actually speaks Norwegian as a first language, so if I want to use a diphthong where she uses a monophthong or a schwa where she uses a long vowel, just because I think that sounds better, then that's my prerogative: it doesn't come from me being unable to pronounce my own surname in its original language, obviously, and it's not a matter of dumbing it down for foreigners, either, it simply sounds better to me and that's all there is to it... Well, "all there is to it", I do think that there is some underlying baggage about things like language politics or national identity that underpins the whole "how do we say our own surname?" debate, when it's between an immigrant and an immigrant's child.
But regardless, this doesn't mean that I don't also cringe at the ways other Anglophones say a lot of Norwegian place names, or for that matter how other Norwegians say a lot of English loanwords, and in these situations I'll think, "They should use my pronunciation instead! Mine is way better!"... But ultimately I know that this is all very silly, right? Because I know from experience how awkward it can be to try to convert a word from one sound system to another, and I'm sure that this goes doubly for those who grew up monolingual. So the ways in which other people try to adapt a word or name into another language isn't of any less value, fundamentally, it's just... different from what I personally would've done. My pronunciations are just one approach among many possibilities.
The one who can make peace with this fact should make peace with it.
We need to gatekeep our language more imo, I know it's hard cause the internet gives people free access to our culture but I'm tired of this shit
Tiktok has been such a facilitator it’s unbelievable. Within a week or two a word I’ve never heard a single white person use will be a part of the average genZer’s/genAlpha’s lexicon. Plus they will then be called “meme words” 💀
I do not really care but something will always be uncomfortable about a 13 year old white kid saying rizz and gyatt in every other sentence.
God I fucking hate this term so much it's not even a word it's just onomatopoeia 💀 we already have plenty of terms for ass/booty/cake
Language evolves and changes and I'm aware things change between generations but like damn man this feels like a complete regression. I blame capitalism
Wait at the risk of sounding incredibly old and white gyatt means ass? I thought it was supposed to be like an alternate phonetic spelling of "Got Damn"
The etymology I'd always heard for "gyatt" was that the meaning went from the exclamation "got damn" itself, to something that might make one exclaim "got damn" -- namely, a big ole sexy bumbum
Yeah exactly, ain't that some shit 💀 something that has nothing to do with the actual ass, just what you'd say if you saw one... smdh
something something bearing no resemblance to the original
More than the word I hate the way it is used incessantly by children in TikTok comments whenever someone has a nice ass ("I GYATT to see it", "you GYATT to give it to her") just shut the fuck up already
THAT DOESNT EVEN MAKE SENSE WTF I HATE IT HERE
It really is weird hearing American suburban white kids on TikTok talking like the inner city kids I went to school with when I lived in the US. It’s really irritating to hear black slang referred to as “gen Z slang”
Gen Z didn't even come up with most of it, it was Black Millennials 🙄 funny how they spent the last decade attributing everything to us yet can't seem to give credit where it's due
Can't wait for South African sayings to hit the streets of the Western world eventually lol. It's all over TikTok. Some cringe 16 year old named Kyle in the Midwest telling someone to voetsek lol. Or some kid going haibo instead of wtf. Or some kid trying to be sassy typing out mxm without knowing what it means or how to pronounce it. Some mom or dad saying eish wena.
A random side note is that I once coined sjoe as a gender-neutral pronoun for one of my conlangs — more specifically ⟨sjoe⟩ is one of the two standard ways of romanizing this word, but it's the romanization that I use by far the most often because it's ASCII friendly.
To quickly explain the etymology of the pronoun sjoe: it comes from sj- (root for 3S pronouns) + -oe (standard gender-neutral equivalent to -a / -e). I can go in more depth but I don't think that's necessary, you get the picture.
Anyways, after getting comfortable with using the word sjoe in my conlang, I even started sometimes using sjoe in English when referring to third-gender or non-binary characters from my conworld — I justified this practice by saying that the word sjoe was to many of these characters essentially a sacred and untranslatable mark of respect. And then when I started getting comfortable with using sjoe in English for fictional characters, I even started considering using sjoe for myself, because I'd already coined the word and I liked the sound of it and it's my conlang so I can do whatever the heck I please with it.
...And then one day I decided to look up "sjoe" on Wiktionary on a whim, just to see if this word happened by some off chance to coincidentally also be a real word used in any natural languages.
...
...Alright so it turns out that South Africans, through some bizarre twist of fate, apparently use sjoe as an interjection. Which means that South Africans — although the sjoe of my conlang is etymologically unrelated and not pronounced the same as the interjection sjoe — probably would've read the things I'd written about my conworld's characters as something like, "Phew! castrated whoo!-self as a teenager and became a choir singer, but due to rejection from whew!'s family ended up running away; sheesh! ended up finding a powerful sentient shield in a forest built by an ancient civilization, and with this shield wow! came to uncover all the secrets and conspiracies of yeesh!'s world..."
I ultimately decided against using sjoe for myself.
Yeah that's true it's basically like saying wow or damn or phew. So yeah it would be confusing to read.
It reads like poetry, maybe you'll come around to it eventually.
I can't imagine how other cultures might feel, like English already directly steals from other languages and claims it for itself
Can't tell you how many times I've cringed cause people can't pronounce karaoke correctly
"Carry-okey" 🙄
I honestly don't mind people saying things like "carry-okey". I am 100% capable of saying カラオケ with a flawless heiban pitch accent, with vowel and consonant qualities that would totally shock natives and make them do triple backflips out of excitement... But I'm also not going to just say "I was home alone so I did some カラオケ to my favorite songs while no-one could hear me." — the pronunciation of "karaoke" going to be anglicized in one way or another, and English does indeed have a limited set of phonemes and some number of phonotactic restrictions and so forth. Relevant for "carry-okey" is diaeresis and the checked vs free vowels.
Ultimately I don't think that "carry-okey" is any more "criminal" a pronunciation than Japanese people themselves saying, well, kara-ōkesʉtora — the Japanese tendency to epenthesize extra vowels in loan words to satisfy that language's phonotactic restrictions is literally optimality theory 101 type stuff. But we place higher expectations on Americans to say things "correctly" basically just because they're Americans: this judgment is divorced from all that boring academic linguistics stuff, and is more just about preconceptions and prejudices and engaging in the social activity of dunking on how dumb Americans are...
...I dunno, I grew up speaking two languages myself, English and Norwegian. I'm already very used to Americanizing my own name and place names in my local area and things like that, to my relatives who only speak English, as well as Norwegianizing the names of relatives and place names in the United States. My mom actually argues with me on occasion that I Americanize my surname "the wrong way", because her pronunciation of our surname tries to approximate the original Norwegian pronunciation as much as possible, whereas my pronunciation is a lot more orthographic and "casual". And I just tell mom when that topic comes up that I'm the one of us two who actually speaks Norwegian as a first language, so if I want to use a diphthong where she uses a monophthong or a schwa where she uses a long vowel, just because I think that sounds better, then that's my prerogative: it doesn't come from me being unable to pronounce my own surname in its original language, obviously, and it's not a matter of dumbing it down for foreigners, either, it simply sounds better to me and that's all there is to it... Well, "all there is to it", I do think that there is some underlying baggage about things like language politics or national identity that underpins the whole "how do we say our own surname?" debate, when it's between an immigrant and an immigrant's child.
But regardless, this doesn't mean that I don't also cringe at the ways other Anglophones say a lot of Norwegian place names, or for that matter how other Norwegians say a lot of English loanwords, and in these situations I'll think, "They should use my pronunciation instead! Mine is way better!"... But ultimately I know that this is all very silly, right? Because I know from experience how awkward it can be to try to convert a word from one sound system to another, and I'm sure that this goes doubly for those who grew up monolingual. So the ways in which other people try to adapt a word or name into another language isn't of any less value, fundamentally, it's just... different from what I personally would've done. My pronunciations are just one approach among many possibilities.
The one who can make peace with this fact should make peace with it.