- Registrado
- 9 de Ago, 2022
I remember being a kid and watching an episode of South Park where someone gets called an "ass spelunker," and wondering to myself "what's an aspie lunker?" Back then neither of those words had a colloquial meaning, but now at least one of them does.
Similarly, being a kid and playing with spoonerisms -- tig ol bitties, Teen Laqueefa, etc -- "sock cucker" didn't mean anything, but now it's whoever fucks Miss Piggy. And soccer cuck is even more self explanatory.
When I'm driving around riffing on Mario Judah's Die Very Rough singing "you are not trad enough / you are not based enough / you are pozzed as fuck," I can't help but think about how none of those words would have made any sense ten years ago.
If you went back in time and told your ancestors that their progeny would watch hulu on the teevee with a roku over wifi, they'd burn you at the fucking stake.
I've had a thought for a long time now that we assign the shortest words to things at the level with which we most readily conceptualize them, and as you abstract further into specificity or generalness the words get longer. For example, a cat is first and foremost a cat, then more generally a feline, an animal, and an organism; or specifically a longhair, a Norwegian longhair, etc. But companies seem to be capitalizing on this and naming their products things like "skub". Meanwhile, pop culture gives meaning to monosylabic words like "yeet" and "djent" and "floof" and "brap". And with the death of death that is the Internet and indiscriminate archival, phoneme clusters that would otherwise be forgotten and freed up retain a permanent meaning, at least more readily than in the past.
How long until we start to run out of words? What will we do? Will we shift to a tonal language, or just go the German route of making every new word longer and longer? Will we incorporate new sounds? Or will speech be replaced by Neuralink and iChip by then? What word will we use to replace "literally" now that "literally" means figuratively?
Similarly, being a kid and playing with spoonerisms -- tig ol bitties, Teen Laqueefa, etc -- "sock cucker" didn't mean anything, but now it's whoever fucks Miss Piggy. And soccer cuck is even more self explanatory.
When I'm driving around riffing on Mario Judah's Die Very Rough singing "you are not trad enough / you are not based enough / you are pozzed as fuck," I can't help but think about how none of those words would have made any sense ten years ago.
If you went back in time and told your ancestors that their progeny would watch hulu on the teevee with a roku over wifi, they'd burn you at the fucking stake.
I've had a thought for a long time now that we assign the shortest words to things at the level with which we most readily conceptualize them, and as you abstract further into specificity or generalness the words get longer. For example, a cat is first and foremost a cat, then more generally a feline, an animal, and an organism; or specifically a longhair, a Norwegian longhair, etc. But companies seem to be capitalizing on this and naming their products things like "skub". Meanwhile, pop culture gives meaning to monosylabic words like "yeet" and "djent" and "floof" and "brap". And with the death of death that is the Internet and indiscriminate archival, phoneme clusters that would otherwise be forgotten and freed up retain a permanent meaning, at least more readily than in the past.
How long until we start to run out of words? What will we do? Will we shift to a tonal language, or just go the German route of making every new word longer and longer? Will we incorporate new sounds? Or will speech be replaced by Neuralink and iChip by then? What word will we use to replace "literally" now that "literally" means figuratively?
