I agree with you, but I just want to say, as someone exiting his 20s, that saying new words is fun. To me it’s fun and goofy to be 29 and tell your friend that he’s “capping.” Idk I just like funny words
It's fine when it's just in your social circles, that can be fun especially when you're young. It's when it starts getting injected into work language and Zoom calls that it becomes annoying as hell.
For one thing, people older than 40 aren't going to know what the hell you're talking about. Secondly, one shouldn't expect youth jargon to be normal professional language...it's rather silly and immature.
For instance, I can't imagine being at a work meeting and trying to use the popular slang from my own youth: "Gnarly presentation dudette! But your font is totally LAME, like gag me with a spoon!"
If I said that at a meeting I would hope I would be fired on the spot.
I would like to quote briefly the 2002 book When Generations Collide, which presents this as an authentic work-related answering machine message left by a Gen-Xer and reported by a horrified Boomer (who co-wrote the book):
"Uh, dude, I'm a little concerned about the middle montage, it's looking radically raw....Not to worry, we're doin' it digital, we can slice and dice and mix and match, it's going to look stellar, but hook me up with the 411 if you have any questions or I'll just assume you'll call me at three bells."
That (transparently faked) message has haunted me for years.
I miss the old version of hook-up. It was such a nice word for someone like me who is punctuality challenged. "Well, why don't we hook up at the park sometime around noon." That wasn't a rendezvous for sex, it meant we'll meet there somewhere between 11:30 and 1:00.
I'm sure I embarrassed my kids by using it longer than I should. I still occasionally catch myself with "lets hook up around..."
there's a way of using "inauthentic" language that's just playful, self-aware, and goofy - I guess it's a question of context and how seriously you're asking to be taken
"As for the second, well, it’s the enforcement of insecurity, the way cultural elites have created an expectation that all decent people should perform a total lack of self-confidence and perpetual anxiety for others, so that no one feels judged for their own lack of self-esteem."
If you don't give a rat's ass for what they think or their judgments, then there is nothing they can do to you.
"Oh, you're not Tonkinese so it's cultural appropriation to eat rodents with fish sauce!" - Wokemon Champion
"Whatever." - me, who goes back to eating mice with fish sauce and whatever else I like.
That phrase is a total lack of imagination. It's just meant to be offensive. But what do you expect from such judgmental people. Judge not, lest ye be judged.
The one word that keeps coming back to me here is "artifice". So many layers of artifice between the nerdy wannabe theater kid from Westchester and the masque composed of references to cultures and experiences that they have never themselves had that makes up their public face.
I know I know authenticity is as fake as inauthenticity, but it would be neat if our culture allowed for normal, boring sentiments and didn't demand that everyone be "authentic" as portrayed in hyper stylized fiction and TikToks. It's sad (and a bit pathetic) to see so many people try to be unique and distinctive in exactly the same, cookie cutter way.
Ironically, I think it's the rise of social media that has led to a rise in artifice and deception. before, we were content to have normal boring lives out of sight. Now, everything is on display constantly. So all the little shifts and shuffles we do to make our lives seem meaningful and grand have to be practiced constantly.
What I want to know is why do people use "y'all" all the time? Someone born and raised in Suffolk County Long Island, or Wilkes-Barre PA, or Buffalo NY or Portland Oregan. It feels like people are making some kind of statement but I'm not sure what that statement is. Y'all, am I just out of touch?
(the actual answer is that they don't realize the huge crossover between a "southern accent" and African American Vernacular English and think they're talking Black when they are actually talking Jedidiah the Appalachian hill person)
On SJ Twix, it's very common to talk about how tired you are from constantly having to explain the Right Politics to all the dumb normies who expect fairness and equal treatment under the law.
my communication prof long ago described the issue like this: you wouldn't get that same reaction saying you're using "you gals" in a non-gendered way. i think it falls under "using the masculine pronoun as neutral," which simply feels dated now, even when it's not done with ill intent. (fwiw i still slip up and use it in casual speech, and i don't toss and turn all night thinking of the horrors i've committed. it's just something i want to be more conscious about.)
Obviously you can use it otherwise and I think many (most) people won't find it objectionable. But "All" really is neutral and it's no big deal to make that small shift in how I address groups.
Honestly, I think this a weird instance of a coming together of two trends. The first is just about efficiency....."y'all" in the south is -- usually -- a pretty efficient way of eliding two words into a second person plural thing.....and "y'all" is also a way for folks from -- usually the North of late -- avoiding having to gender anyone
What does "y'all" have to do with gender? IIRC, the only gendered pronouns in English are the third-person singular pronouns: he, she, him, her, his, and hers.
I swear to god I'm in the UK and now the word 'y'all' no longer means 'you all' to me, it means 'simpering preface to online admonishment from position of unearned self-righteousness'
Well that makes me sad. I grew up in the south, but near enough to a city that most have no idea. And I always sang the praises of how efficient and useful the word "y'all' was! Ha!
I grew up in New Jersey but live in Virginia. "Y'all" is kind of a useful gender-neutral substitute for "You guys". Obviously when I use that way I am borrowing from southern vernacular, but per Freddie's article, I don't think there is anything wrong with borrowing of that sort.
it absolutely is. you may not have seen but it is. the fact you don't recognise 'y'all ain't ready for that conversation' as practically a parody meme says a lot.
I won't speak for anyone else, but I have defended my own use of "y'all" on the following grounds: :
1) I lived in the south for over half of my adult life and have been married to an Alabama girl for 15 years, so, osmosis, I guess. You'd be shocked how quickly that word can become part of your lexicon.
2) People in places other than the south, like New York--which is, incidentally, where I was born and raised--*do* say y'all! It's just not something the majority of *white people* from New York tend to say. But I do believe this idea that everyone who says "y'all" is either cosplaying or in league with Boss Hogg or something is wide of the mark.
3) More generally, I think, at some point, "y'all" became the preferred substitute for the more, err, problematic "you guys," which admittedly rolls off my tongue a little easier, but I'd just as soon not risk getting the gas face from a pugnacious barista.
I think the thing to think about here is that people using it online are not in fact addressing a group of people. They're just typing something into their phone while taking a shit or whatever. It could be analysed further but not sure it's worth the hassle.
No one should have to defend their use of y'all. It's all over literature, in TV shows since I was a kid, and my father, first-generation German-American and born and raised in New Jersey, used "y'all" and "folks" on a fairly regular basis since my childhood in the 80s. It's just American English.
Yeah. I’m a lifelong upstate New Yorker but my dad is from Arkansas and I definitely absorbed y’all from him and the rest of my Southern relations. 🤷🏻♀️ It’s a useful word!
It's been a Southern or Country thing for many decades, farmers and ranchers in the lower half have been using that word for generations. No idea why it got boosted to the global lexicon, but its roots are really plain.
I was in college in the northeast when this started happening. I didn't grow up in the south but the rest of my family did so I have a very, very slight accent sometimes. It was weird and a little annoying when the same people who would make a big deal about my accent started to say "y'all" in like, thick Jersey accents lol. I don't even say y'all naturally!
I don't really care too much anymore because it is a good word, but it was certainly irritating at the time lol
Because “youse” which was natural to my youth (Queens) is ugly and the plural for you is you which is unsatisfying and unclear. “You all” works well, can quite get to y’all. But coming fro Queens, not pronouncing Aunt like ant feels affected to me.
I'm from Queens too! And I don't know, "youse" doesn't sound any uglier to me than "y'all." But maybe that's because I'm used to it. (Hmm... is "used" ugly? Just kidding!)
Because two years ago the Atlantic came out with a piece that said that "guys" was a gendered second person pronoun, which is excluding to anyone that doesn't identify as a guy, very specifically, probably, excluding to certain trans identified people. And so the MPR tote bag class adopted this overnight and rolled their eyes at all the plebs not in the know.
Never mind that cis women had been using guys and referred to as guys for decades.
*Sorry to bring up the forbidden topic, but I think this is literally the very specific moment when all the Millennial snobs stopped saying 'guys' and started saying 'y'all'.
I sometimes do a slight California version of it because I was born and raised with okies from Bakersfield. I use I mild version with the local rednecks and throw it in a bit when I'm exposed to what we used to call Yuppies. The kind of people who judge you on what kind of car you drive and the clothes you wear. They deserve to be thrown a bit off balance with college level vocabulary spiced with white trash.
I really enjoy reading your columns about these types of subjects because I have almost no idea what you are talking about, and I recognize that if I did know what you were talking about I would also be very annoyed. Thank you for confirming I have my internet correctly filtered for Gen X. By the way, I just ate a sandwich, and my mother (who I loved dearly) is dead.
I can understand how he comes off that way, but he has quality core principles and makes the case that a lot of people don’t and yet want to claim the high ground. He’s a true believer in improving the human condition, and I appreciate that.
Side bar: I've never watched Broad City. My wife has it on occasionally -- what's the swipe at the show here, what are some examples of things the characters do/say in the show that are examples of the annoying things listed in the piece? The screengrab does make me reflexively annoyed.
I think the main characters are a good example of the reflexive urban white millennial tendency to make use of all kinds of Black signifiers in language and style, which again is not offensive to me but fits poorly with the whole Hillary feminism that championed
There's that whole set of Pierre Bourdieu ideas about cultural capital and symbolic violence that to me are the hidden hand behind most of these trends. The overeducated, underemployed millenials that author of the "millenial snot" piece is talking about fit into Bourdieu's schema by being rich in cultural capital but poor in economic capital (his idea of capital is more of a 4 quandrant, two dimensional sort). As such they defend and aggressively hoard this same cultural capital, because it is the primary sort of wealth the possess. This wealth is real, not purely abstract. It allows them to navigate and succeed in social fields which are closed off to many other people.
"Cultural appropriation" is less about this than preserving that same cultural and economic capital. Like, I get why he'd be mad about bubble tea, because he sees it as someone setting foot on his (cultural) turf. It's not altogether different from those regulations in Europe that mandate certain foods can only be legally called that if they are produced in a certain location. It functions sort of like a cultural patent. You can a food item which is virtually identical, you just have to call it another name (if I'm remembering the laws correctly). Anyhow, it's not much deeper than that. The outrage over bubble tea comes off as so phony, hypocritical, and annoying because it's trying to make it into something a whole lot grander than it really is.
"there appears to be no way to end the stigma regarding something without ending up actively celebrating that something"
I think this is a really neat encapsulation of a tendency that appears in so many different guises these days. It's no longer just 'okay' or 'normal' to be sad, angry, rude, depressed, heavier or lighter than others, chronically ill, or whatever else. It's in fact heroic, incredible, amazing, a feat of brilliance.
The reality of many of these states of being is a lot of people may be suffering and wish they weren't suffering, may want to blend in or may wish they could, may work hard to find a way to feel like they are the same as everyone else, but we have to pretend this isn't the case because any and all hardships are reduced to the level of a Netflix storyline.
What's sad is that it's ultimately a way of airbrushing the truth about life: that some dark and difficult things don't stop being dark and difficult, that things happen to us which are unfair and stay unfair, that we may envy others or dislike ourselves for reasons that are not our fault, that joy and misery are complex and mixed up.
And minus that truth I'm not sure you can really have a rich enjoyment of life anyway.
Those exhortations for insecurity sound almost like Christian calls for humility, except that the people advocating for it are really fucking annoying.
Many of the Christian calls for humility have the same irritating tendency to be more about demonstrating how much holier the caller was than the called.
I wish everyone would adopt the Japanese attitude towards cultural appropriation that FdB mentions: a Japanese nerd becomes obsessed with Bluegrass, Scotch, spaghetti, French pastries, or whatever and becomes an expert through painstaking study and practice, ultimately making something as good as or better than the original as an act of devotion. The world would have more cool stuff if this was a normal practice everywhere.
Exactly. It's just humans being humans. All this cultural identity silo-ing is not only mindless bullshit as you say, but it's socially and culturally regressive. It's good to emulate cool stuff from other cultures, why this became 'problematic' is beyond me.
Unfortunately, the real problem seems to be normal people are an endangered species.
It's been a long time since I've properly encountered someone who speaks Millennial Snot. I see them whizzing by on social media, from time to time, and you see their fingerprints on what's left of sites the The Onion; I don't doubt their existence.
Yet they are not as inescapable as they once seemed. The savviest trend-chasers can see the general style growing stale -- even as it appropriates new particular words! -- and have quietly stepped away from it.
Next time I do the "stuff I'm grateful for" thing, that's going on the list.
FWIW I still find a lot of the "snot" in many left spaces; ex: spaces where more than 50% of people sincerely identify as queer anarchists (no hate to the chill queer anarchists, but I live in West Philadelphia - if you know, you know). At least, it's prevalent to the point where I personally find it difficult to participate in IRL activism.
Preachin' to the choir with this one Freddie. Yet the sheer detail and depth of your takedown of whatever this weird snarky vocabulary is deserves commendation. Bravo, good sir! --Ahh crap, that sounds a lot like what you're writing about. I'll just use the relatively benign slang from my own youth: Nice work, dude.
Hey… broad city was openly making fun of Ilana and Abby for being shitty people with nonsense philosophies
until season 2
I agree with you, but I just want to say, as someone exiting his 20s, that saying new words is fun. To me it’s fun and goofy to be 29 and tell your friend that he’s “capping.” Idk I just like funny words
It's fine when it's just in your social circles, that can be fun especially when you're young. It's when it starts getting injected into work language and Zoom calls that it becomes annoying as hell.
For one thing, people older than 40 aren't going to know what the hell you're talking about. Secondly, one shouldn't expect youth jargon to be normal professional language...it's rather silly and immature.
For instance, I can't imagine being at a work meeting and trying to use the popular slang from my own youth: "Gnarly presentation dudette! But your font is totally LAME, like gag me with a spoon!"
If I said that at a meeting I would hope I would be fired on the spot.
Well, then, just call it code switching and you present as an educated, cosmopolitan member of the laptop class.
Are you Bill, or Ted?
I would like to quote briefly the 2002 book When Generations Collide, which presents this as an authentic work-related answering machine message left by a Gen-Xer and reported by a horrified Boomer (who co-wrote the book):
"Uh, dude, I'm a little concerned about the middle montage, it's looking radically raw....Not to worry, we're doin' it digital, we can slice and dice and mix and match, it's going to look stellar, but hook me up with the 411 if you have any questions or I'll just assume you'll call me at three bells."
That (transparently faked) message has haunted me for years.
I miss the old version of hook-up. It was such a nice word for someone like me who is punctuality challenged. "Well, why don't we hook up at the park sometime around noon." That wasn't a rendezvous for sex, it meant we'll meet there somewhere between 11:30 and 1:00.
I'm sure I embarrassed my kids by using it longer than I should. I still occasionally catch myself with "lets hook up around..."
slang. not jargon.
> people older than 40 aren't going to know what the hell you're talking about
Feature, not a bug. We can't compete with them on skills but we can compete on creating an impenetrable social lingo.
Touché! Something like this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49l39sSrGqk
It's also fun to be 43 and get it wrong. Now I know why the adults did it as a kid.
there's a way of using "inauthentic" language that's just playful, self-aware, and goofy - I guess it's a question of context and how seriously you're asking to be taken
"As for the second, well, it’s the enforcement of insecurity, the way cultural elites have created an expectation that all decent people should perform a total lack of self-confidence and perpetual anxiety for others, so that no one feels judged for their own lack of self-esteem."
If you don't give a rat's ass for what they think or their judgments, then there is nothing they can do to you.
"Oh, you're not Tonkinese so it's cultural appropriation to eat rodents with fish sauce!" - Wokemon Champion
"Whatever." - me, who goes back to eating mice with fish sauce and whatever else I like.
Also, what does "she serves cunt" mean?
At this point, God only knows.
And even SHE doesn't care!
Thank you for asking that. What's capping also.
I have no clue.
It's Social Justice Calvinism. You are a rotten worthless sinner/privileged, and everything you do only makes that sin/privilege worse.
That phrase is a total lack of imagination. It's just meant to be offensive. But what do you expect from such judgmental people. Judge not, lest ye be judged.
The one word that keeps coming back to me here is "artifice". So many layers of artifice between the nerdy wannabe theater kid from Westchester and the masque composed of references to cultures and experiences that they have never themselves had that makes up their public face.
I know I know authenticity is as fake as inauthenticity, but it would be neat if our culture allowed for normal, boring sentiments and didn't demand that everyone be "authentic" as portrayed in hyper stylized fiction and TikToks. It's sad (and a bit pathetic) to see so many people try to be unique and distinctive in exactly the same, cookie cutter way.
Ironically, I think it's the rise of social media that has led to a rise in artifice and deception. before, we were content to have normal boring lives out of sight. Now, everything is on display constantly. So all the little shifts and shuffles we do to make our lives seem meaningful and grand have to be practiced constantly.
It's hard to be witty and unique. Most of us can't do it. But we all can be authentic.
What I want to know is why do people use "y'all" all the time? Someone born and raised in Suffolk County Long Island, or Wilkes-Barre PA, or Buffalo NY or Portland Oregan. It feels like people are making some kind of statement but I'm not sure what that statement is. Y'all, am I just out of touch?
Stop gatekeeping the folx and their folksy folk phrasings! Y'all I'm so tired
(the actual answer is that they don't realize the huge crossover between a "southern accent" and African American Vernacular English and think they're talking Black when they are actually talking Jedidiah the Appalachian hill person)
God Northeasterners can be some condescending pieces of shit
They could also be talking Atticus the brilliant country lawyer, was just trying to make a point with a flourish. I love Appalachia/the South.
The Jim Jones homage at the end? I saw what you did there
On SJ Twix, it's very common to talk about how tired you are from constantly having to explain the Right Politics to all the dumb normies who expect fairness and equal treatment under the law.
It’s an inclusive second-person plural, basically. I use it all the time at work.
same. better than "you guys"; english unfortunately doesn't have anything else comparable to the german "ihr."
Is "you guys out" of favor? We used to use it non-gendered.
my communication prof long ago described the issue like this: you wouldn't get that same reaction saying you're using "you gals" in a non-gendered way. i think it falls under "using the masculine pronoun as neutral," which simply feels dated now, even when it's not done with ill intent. (fwiw i still slip up and use it in casual speech, and i don't toss and turn all night thinking of the horrors i've committed. it's just something i want to be more conscious about.)
It's gendered by definition? "Guys" is masculine.
Obviously you can use it otherwise and I think many (most) people won't find it objectionable. But "All" really is neutral and it's no big deal to make that small shift in how I address groups.
Honestly, I think this a weird instance of a coming together of two trends. The first is just about efficiency....."y'all" in the south is -- usually -- a pretty efficient way of eliding two words into a second person plural thing.....and "y'all" is also a way for folks from -- usually the North of late -- avoiding having to gender anyone
And to be clear, I root for both of these reasons and hope the merge into each other!
What does "y'all" have to do with gender? IIRC, the only gendered pronouns in English are the third-person singular pronouns: he, she, him, her, his, and hers.
In contrast to "you guys," which is/was the northern y'all
I swear to god I'm in the UK and now the word 'y'all' no longer means 'you all' to me, it means 'simpering preface to online admonishment from position of unearned self-righteousness'
Perhaps this is just me growing up with the word, but maybe it's just others realizing that it's pretty efficient?
The English language definitely needs a 'you plural' - I grew up in Ireland and people from the south there use 'ye'.
But the online 'y'all' has become this weird version of what I said above.
Well that makes me sad. I grew up in the south, but near enough to a city that most have no idea. And I always sang the praises of how efficient and useful the word "y'all' was! Ha!
Same
I grew up in New Jersey but live in Virginia. "Y'all" is kind of a useful gender-neutral substitute for "You guys". Obviously when I use that way I am borrowing from southern vernacular, but per Freddie's article, I don't think there is anything wrong with borrowing of that sort.
I don't always post online admonishment, but whenever I do, I leave the colloquialism "y'all" out of it.
Now, I *do* agree that using *y'all* as an accusatory type thing kinda sucks
people online can be really annoying
but y'all ain't ready for that conversation
j'accuse!
It just isn't done, mixing "y'all" into Online Lecture Mode.
it absolutely is. you may not have seen but it is. the fact you don't recognise 'y'all ain't ready for that conversation' as practically a parody meme says a lot.
I get that the Internet is capable of degrading literally anything, literally.
Is there no Propriety?
< internet bish nobs perpetrating a crime
Hi! [insert apposite occupation] here!
I don't know who needs to hear this, but [insert lecture here] [draw intended moral from lecture here], but y'all ain't ready for that conversation.
Wtf does that even mean
Ohhh, it is an on-line phrase.
I won't speak for anyone else, but I have defended my own use of "y'all" on the following grounds: :
1) I lived in the south for over half of my adult life and have been married to an Alabama girl for 15 years, so, osmosis, I guess. You'd be shocked how quickly that word can become part of your lexicon.
2) People in places other than the south, like New York--which is, incidentally, where I was born and raised--*do* say y'all! It's just not something the majority of *white people* from New York tend to say. But I do believe this idea that everyone who says "y'all" is either cosplaying or in league with Boss Hogg or something is wide of the mark.
3) More generally, I think, at some point, "y'all" became the preferred substitute for the more, err, problematic "you guys," which admittedly rolls off my tongue a little easier, but I'd just as soon not risk getting the gas face from a pugnacious barista.
I think the thing to think about here is that people using it online are not in fact addressing a group of people. They're just typing something into their phone while taking a shit or whatever. It could be analysed further but not sure it's worth the hassle.
No one should have to defend their use of y'all. It's all over literature, in TV shows since I was a kid, and my father, first-generation German-American and born and raised in New Jersey, used "y'all" and "folks" on a fairly regular basis since my childhood in the 80s. It's just American English.
Yeah. I’m a lifelong upstate New Yorker but my dad is from Arkansas and I definitely absorbed y’all from him and the rest of my Southern relations. 🤷🏻♀️ It’s a useful word!
It's time to make "yins" a thing
Hahahah!!! I know it has no moral difference vs. y'all.....but....I. Just. Can't!
I say yu'ns but yeah.
It's been a Southern or Country thing for many decades, farmers and ranchers in the lower half have been using that word for generations. No idea why it got boosted to the global lexicon, but its roots are really plain.
Because every time it makes me think and laugh about the "y'all motherfuckers need jesus" meme
I was in college in the northeast when this started happening. I didn't grow up in the south but the rest of my family did so I have a very, very slight accent sometimes. It was weird and a little annoying when the same people who would make a big deal about my accent started to say "y'all" in like, thick Jersey accents lol. I don't even say y'all naturally!
I don't really care too much anymore because it is a good word, but it was certainly irritating at the time lol
Y’all is a good word. It’s useful.
They didn't take Latin.
Because “youse” which was natural to my youth (Queens) is ugly and the plural for you is you which is unsatisfying and unclear. “You all” works well, can quite get to y’all. But coming fro Queens, not pronouncing Aunt like ant feels affected to me.
I'm from Queens too! And I don't know, "youse" doesn't sound any uglier to me than "y'all." But maybe that's because I'm used to it. (Hmm... is "used" ugly? Just kidding!)
Maybe inelegant is more the thing than ugly. Y’all sounds like peach trees and youse sounds like parking lots. I still use “you guys” too.
Pity the poor Pittsburghers, who have to use "yins."
It's an incredibly efficient way to refer directly to a group of people. That's it. Embrace it.
It’s gender neutral and fun.
Because two years ago the Atlantic came out with a piece that said that "guys" was a gendered second person pronoun, which is excluding to anyone that doesn't identify as a guy, very specifically, probably, excluding to certain trans identified people. And so the MPR tote bag class adopted this overnight and rolled their eyes at all the plebs not in the know.
Never mind that cis women had been using guys and referred to as guys for decades.
*Sorry to bring up the forbidden topic, but I think this is literally the very specific moment when all the Millennial snobs stopped saying 'guys' and started saying 'y'all'.
So much forbidden language, so many changes. So ridiculous. It sounds so academic.
Do they do it in writing? or is it just verbal?
I sometimes do a slight California version of it because I was born and raised with okies from Bakersfield. I use I mild version with the local rednecks and throw it in a bit when I'm exposed to what we used to call Yuppies. The kind of people who judge you on what kind of car you drive and the clothes you wear. They deserve to be thrown a bit off balance with college level vocabulary spiced with white trash.
I really enjoy reading your columns about these types of subjects because I have almost no idea what you are talking about, and I recognize that if I did know what you were talking about I would also be very annoyed. Thank you for confirming I have my internet correctly filtered for Gen X. By the way, I just ate a sandwich, and my mother (who I loved dearly) is dead.
I dunno man...FDBs stuff often feels, and reads like, banality 'reporting' on banality.
I can understand how he comes off that way, but he has quality core principles and makes the case that a lot of people don’t and yet want to claim the high ground. He’s a true believer in improving the human condition, and I appreciate that.
there's other stuff to read, man
Boy am I glad the heyday of Twitter and Milennial Snot is over, and I say this as a Milennial. It's painful to read.
I have trouble tolerating my generation.
Side bar: I've never watched Broad City. My wife has it on occasionally -- what's the swipe at the show here, what are some examples of things the characters do/say in the show that are examples of the annoying things listed in the piece? The screengrab does make me reflexively annoyed.
I think the main characters are a good example of the reflexive urban white millennial tendency to make use of all kinds of Black signifiers in language and style, which again is not offensive to me but fits poorly with the whole Hillary feminism that championed
Still like Broad City more than Girls.
The ad they did for MiraLAX was funny too.
There's that whole set of Pierre Bourdieu ideas about cultural capital and symbolic violence that to me are the hidden hand behind most of these trends. The overeducated, underemployed millenials that author of the "millenial snot" piece is talking about fit into Bourdieu's schema by being rich in cultural capital but poor in economic capital (his idea of capital is more of a 4 quandrant, two dimensional sort). As such they defend and aggressively hoard this same cultural capital, because it is the primary sort of wealth the possess. This wealth is real, not purely abstract. It allows them to navigate and succeed in social fields which are closed off to many other people.
"Cultural appropriation" is less about this than preserving that same cultural and economic capital. Like, I get why he'd be mad about bubble tea, because he sees it as someone setting foot on his (cultural) turf. It's not altogether different from those regulations in Europe that mandate certain foods can only be legally called that if they are produced in a certain location. It functions sort of like a cultural patent. You can a food item which is virtually identical, you just have to call it another name (if I'm remembering the laws correctly). Anyhow, it's not much deeper than that. The outrage over bubble tea comes off as so phony, hypocritical, and annoying because it's trying to make it into something a whole lot grander than it really is.
The issue isn't "other people doing our thing," it's "other people moving in on our thing."
I’ll believe that wealth is “real” when it can be used to pay one’s bills. We live in a material world and material wealth is what matters.
"there appears to be no way to end the stigma regarding something without ending up actively celebrating that something"
I think this is a really neat encapsulation of a tendency that appears in so many different guises these days. It's no longer just 'okay' or 'normal' to be sad, angry, rude, depressed, heavier or lighter than others, chronically ill, or whatever else. It's in fact heroic, incredible, amazing, a feat of brilliance.
The reality of many of these states of being is a lot of people may be suffering and wish they weren't suffering, may want to blend in or may wish they could, may work hard to find a way to feel like they are the same as everyone else, but we have to pretend this isn't the case because any and all hardships are reduced to the level of a Netflix storyline.
What's sad is that it's ultimately a way of airbrushing the truth about life: that some dark and difficult things don't stop being dark and difficult, that things happen to us which are unfair and stay unfair, that we may envy others or dislike ourselves for reasons that are not our fault, that joy and misery are complex and mixed up.
And minus that truth I'm not sure you can really have a rich enjoyment of life anyway.
Stunning and brave?
this is well said
Those exhortations for insecurity sound almost like Christian calls for humility, except that the people advocating for it are really fucking annoying.
Many of the Christian calls for humility have the same irritating tendency to be more about demonstrating how much holier the caller was than the called.
Blessed are the passive-aggressive, for they are not technically sinning, they're "being polite."
I wish everyone would adopt the Japanese attitude towards cultural appropriation that FdB mentions: a Japanese nerd becomes obsessed with Bluegrass, Scotch, spaghetti, French pastries, or whatever and becomes an expert through painstaking study and practice, ultimately making something as good as or better than the original as an act of devotion. The world would have more cool stuff if this was a normal practice everywhere.
It IS normal practice. For normal people. All the other stuff is just mindless bullshit.
Exactly. It's just humans being humans. All this cultural identity silo-ing is not only mindless bullshit as you say, but it's socially and culturally regressive. It's good to emulate cool stuff from other cultures, why this became 'problematic' is beyond me.
Unfortunately, the real problem seems to be normal people are an endangered species.
It's been a long time since I've properly encountered someone who speaks Millennial Snot. I see them whizzing by on social media, from time to time, and you see their fingerprints on what's left of sites the The Onion; I don't doubt their existence.
Yet they are not as inescapable as they once seemed. The savviest trend-chasers can see the general style growing stale -- even as it appropriates new particular words! -- and have quietly stepped away from it.
Next time I do the "stuff I'm grateful for" thing, that's going on the list.
FWIW I still find a lot of the "snot" in many left spaces; ex: spaces where more than 50% of people sincerely identify as queer anarchists (no hate to the chill queer anarchists, but I live in West Philadelphia - if you know, you know). At least, it's prevalent to the point where I personally find it difficult to participate in IRL activism.
plenty of laugh lines in this one
Thanks Freddie this is my new favorite article of yours. Slay queen!
It was one of his top pieces ... but what's the whole 'ate' thing?
I'm GenX. I'm too old for this ****
Preachin' to the choir with this one Freddie. Yet the sheer detail and depth of your takedown of whatever this weird snarky vocabulary is deserves commendation. Bravo, good sir! --Ahh crap, that sounds a lot like what you're writing about. I'll just use the relatively benign slang from my own youth: Nice work, dude.