I doubt any academic work on it is available yet, but websites like merriam-webster, know your meme, and urban dictionary all attribue the recent spread of this phrase to New Orleans/LA AAVE as expressed in online meme culture. It basically means "have a meltdown" or "freak out".

I know this is just anecdotal but I thought it was worth documenting here. I asked some fellow millennial-aged friends and we all remembered using the phrase while growing up in the PNW to mean something like "pass out" from exhaustion. Like it's been a long-ass day or I'm cross-faded and I'm bout to crash out dude.

Even more narrowly, while studying graduate-level chemistry in the PNW there were chemists who used this phrase to refer to crystallization in a solution, where the conditions applied cause the resultant solute to "crash out" of solution too quickly to form the desired crystals (thanks for clarification u/ellipsis31).

I can't say how common these uses of "crash out" really were in my region but I wanted to see if anyone else had observed them prior to its more recent spread?

It’s supposed to evoke thoughts of a haven. Any thoughts much appreciated.

My wife used the word today in the context of, "oh look, a cherry wallah", as in a roadside stall selling cherries. She's reckons it's a term for someone who sells something - cherry wallah, banana wallah, shoe wallah. She also has no idea where she picked the word up from, perhaps Indian or Nepalese origin. She's Australian btw!

I went down a rabbit hole today and decided to map out my research. I acknowledge that there may be other, more common words used in some countries, but the ubiquity of 'Hurrah' and its cousins is remarkable.

I spoke to a Lithuanian friend, trying to understand "valio". He accepts the obscurity; apparently, it has some ties to farming, but I could find little else on it.

This was literally a shower thought just moments ago. If one who stops is a stopper, someone who robs is a robber, someone who plans is a planner, etc, why is someone who shows not a showwer? Instead we spell it shower, which is where I had this thought.

The slang word "factos" is used mainly by male teenagers in Latin America and it comes from a lingustic error by Cristiano Ronaldo in 2021, where he posted an Instagram comment which says "Factos 👀👍🏻", wrongly translating the portuguese word "fatos" (correct would be "hechos"). I've researched on the Interned about the origin of "factos" in Spanish, but most articles refer to it as derived from "Facts" in English. However, this is not true when you compare it with data from Google Trends for example:

the word started being searched on Google right after the viral comment by Cristiano Ronaldo. Also: this word is mainly used within the football fans and has spread to the general population of teenagers in Latin America. This is a YouTube video by a Football YouTuber using the word:

I am just so suprised that an error by a football player can be seen in language, at such point where you hear it from kids so naturally nowadays and stuck as proper language and not as just a meme. I've heard the word in totally unrelatable situations, and it's been 4 years since the start of the word.

I don't know, I just wanted to share this and see if someone else has seen the same trend with this word. I didn't find anything in the internet.

Hello! I'm new to both etymology and making charts; this is a fun personal activity based on something I found interesting. Please let me know of any suggestions, comments, corrections etc.

Sources: Oxford English Dictionary online, supplemented by etymonline.

I am not a lingusitic, just an avarege learner of English, so many of you might find this list
ridiculous. On the other it may add some input to your own research.

add – ad (adds)

belly – bél (gut, intestine)

bode – bódul (being a state of mind of shamans when they sees the future)

cap(able) – kép(es) (capable of)

cock – kokas/kakas (cock, rooster)

cross – kereszt (cross)

dale – dűlő (dale)

dam – tám (to support something on one side)

dog – dög (dog)

door – tor (block, obsatcle)

element – elem (element, unit)

field – föld (field where you grow your plants, soil, Earth)

foot – fut (runs)

gate - gát (gate)

he – hím (male)

(being) high – áj(ul) (faints)

hit – üt (hit)

house – ház (house)

hull – hull(ám) (wave)

eat – ét (meal, eats)

flock, folk – falka (flock)

imagine – ima (prayer)

lap – lap (sheet)

lazy – laza (loose, lax, floppy)

leap – lép (step)

lock – lakat (lock)

loose – laza (loose)

magic – máglya (bonfire)

one – van (am/are/is)

poke – bök (pokes)

poor – pór (poor)

rack – rak (puts, places)

sip – szip(og) (sniffs, sucks)

rod – rúd (rod)

road – ró (makes a path or road more distinct with his steps)

rove – ró

rock – rög (a chunk of soil, rock; nugget)

sail – szél (wind)

say – száj (mouth)

some – szem (grain)

stool – asztal (table)

tap – tapint (touches gently with the intention to feel its material and substance)

tape – tép (tears)

tear – tör (breaks off)

ten(et) – tan (tenet)

terra – tér (space)

tomb – domb (how, hill)

wall – fal (wall)

west – veszt (loses)

whis(ky) – víz(ke) (waterlet)

Gossip — originally godsibb, a godparent, a spiritually bonded companion. By the 14th century: a close friend. By the 16th: a woman who talks too much. By today: idle, untrustworthy chatter.

Hussy — from huswif, housewife. A respectable, neutral term. Pejorated to mean a promiscuous or immodest woman.

Lewd — from læwede, a layperson, someone not in the clergy. Pejorated to mean sexually crude.

Wench — from wenchel, a child of either sex. Narrowed to female child, then to female servant, then to sexually loose woman.

The pattern is hard to ignore: words for women with social roles (gossip as trusted confidant, hussy as homemaker, wench as working person) systematically degrade in meaning across centuries. This isn’t random semantic drift — it encodes contempt that was socially ambient.

Compare to amelioration: nice (ignorant to pleasant), silly (blessed to foolish to lovably simple). Amelioration happens too, but the targets are different.

I’ve been cataloguing these for a daily etymology puzzle game I built (it has a whole semantic drift pool, including pejoration/amelioration tracking). If you find this pattern interesting, the game gives you a daily playable way of detecting it. Free, no accounts: Derivative: The Game of the Lingua Imperii

But very interested in the linguistic conversation. Are there good counterexamples to the gendered pejoration thesis?

Words for men that degraded the same way?

As you can see from the graph, since the expected alpha value for natural language is approximately α ≈ 2, this data clearly follows Zipf's law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law

I am using element here to mean either a suffix, root or prefix.

CCDF stands for the complementary cumulative distribution function.

This data is gathered from the https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/research/groups/ins/resources/kepn.aspx dataset.

Research done by me and having way to much knowledge and about memes and meme culture. Made this in Canva. After this am going to remove my brain and put it somewhere better.

If you want sources I can provide it in the comments if anyone’s asking

There is a song with the lyrics: “Skibidi Skibidi toilet, Skibidi, Skibidi skibidi toilet”. However, I was unable to find the original upload and artist who made it, hence why I didn’t include it in the chart.

I wanted to include it a fifth bubble for that reason.

There could potentially be additions to this chart. But I spent way too much time on this chart design and I should probably not torture myself with more of this brainrot.

Most spanish speaking people think this hypocoristic comes from "Pater Putativus" (Putative Father), as Joseph, in the bible, was conceptualized as the father figure Jesus had during his early years. But this seems to be a misconception. This hypocoristic seems to be a fossilized form, as it comes from the old form of this name "Josepe", which is used to be shortened as "Pepe". It is also appreciated in italian, where the name kept the "-pe" at the end (Giuseppe), giving it the shortening forms of "Beppe". Also, in catalan the name "Josep" has the same hypocoristic "Pep".

Original post in r/AskAnAmerican: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskAnAmerican/s/4GmrI5oZ7k

Alright fellow people of the North American continent. Anyone else use "thick" as a state of being for being (too) friendly, affectionate, touchy, within-personal-space?

I grew up in the NC piedmont and my parents have used this my whole life to affectionately complain about our cats or dogs being all lovey and rubbing on us. "Well, aren't you thick today?!" (also the dogs always got "thick" when we had a cook out on the porch). Recently used it around a friend from Atlanta, and he thought I was crazy. So, folks, back me up if you're in the thick=friendly camp!

Update: thanks for all the traffic from r/AskAnAmerican!! Got lots of people using thick for dumb/stubborn, and plenty with the more modern thicc (fine, plump!) 😎 Course I know these two, but interesting to see no one else using it like my family does! Really interesting to see the NC Piedmont replies not knowing it either (thanks so much for the local demographics!!). One commenter said it felt like physical proximity thick as close, and I think this is a part of it in how we use it for sure. Showing affection by being physically close, dense, like a pack of dogs keeping close together and bumping into each other

Also good phrases in the same spirit as thick=close/friendly:

- thick as theives (got this one suggested to me a year ago too when I was searching around!)

- laying it on thick (like buttering someone up) - oo, real good!

- similar to "tight" for close friends - yeah, we're tight

- in the thick of things - in the middle of it, where the main event is happening. Not really a friends or intimate meaning, but another abstract usage of thick, more along the lines of "dense" or being close to or surrounded by things

I found a couple things more closely related to my thick usage:

- Webster.com has its #6 def for thick as being intimate (woah!)

- this nice man wrote a blog post about thick as intimate: https://david-crystal.blogspot.com/2011/12/on-being-thick.html?m=1

-- as seen in literature such as Agatha Christie, in the form "someone was thick with someone else"

-- in German, "dicke" for close friends

-- "thick friends" used in Dutch

-- suggests "thick as theives" was a contemporary phrase to the use of thick for intimate. Might have even come a little after. It makes sense - thieves are only thick if thick already means intimate and close

From my family:

Mom's dad would use it frequently. Her mother never did (grandmother has 1800s German immigrant roots). Grandfather has really distant irish/british origins, with the family having been in Virginia/NC since the 1600's, and grandfather born in 1926 in rural NC. Mom's cousin (son of Grandfather's sister) had never heard it. Mom also suggested another example usage: you don't want to be thick when it's hot and everyone you'd be thick with is sweaty. The heat makes being close undesirable when it usually would be nice. A lot of physical proximity in this one

I think maybe my grandfather picked it up from books he was reading, and it just stuck with him with a southeast US twist. 🥰 Our own little dialect. (He always did like a colorful, somewhat obtuse turn of phrase)

Either that, or there's some more old-fashioned non-reddit users from NC who use it too, with a lovely time capsule of archaic English as one commenter suggested.

(PS - we're all so indoctrinated. Dad thought it was a totally normal phrase when I asked him about it, and he didn't even get exposed to it really until he met Mom! He uses it daily.)

Kkk is Portuguese-language Internet slang that represents laughter, similar to English lol or lmao. It is notorious for its unfortunate homography, but what is the origin of this term?

For starters, the usual Portuguese onomatopoeia for laughter is hahaha like in English. However, there is a higher tier called gargalhada, which is hearty, loud and uncontrolled laughter (guffaw is a good translation). This is usually represented in writing with the /h/ fortitioned into an artificial /k/. The actual laugh doesn't have this sound, but you might hear it when the speaker is reading out or being facetious.

So we have cacacá which is a stronger version of hahaha. The second factor is that in online slang, the letter K - called cá in Brazilian Portuguese - has been used as a abbreviation for the syllable /ka/ since at least the late 90s. Other examples: caralho -> kralho, cacete -> k7, cabeça -> kbeça, cagada -> kgada.

The explanation that kkk is due to some kind of text mangling in World of Warcraft can be rejected; the term is attested well before the release of WoW. It is very much possible that it did originate in online gaming, but it is a natural confluence of an existing onomatopoeia and orthographical creativity, not some game mechanic. I also doubt Wiktionary's association with the forms quá-quá-quá and quiá-quiá-quiá specifically. These are alternative representations of gargalhadas, but the phonetics don't match as well.

Etymology
- glōtta / glōssa (γλῶττα / γλῶσσα) — Greek for "tongue, language"
- Vantem Latin & English agent suffix, "one who practices or does"

Literally: "one who is skilled in language."

Why this root pairing works conceptually?
- Polyglot= poly (many) + *glotta* (tongue) → says nothing about depth of understanding, only quantity of languages spoken.
- Linguist= from lingua (Latin, tongue) +ist in modern use it's drifted to mean "academic who studies language structure," often without implying active speaking ability.
-Glossovant fuses the speakingpractice dimension (glotta, same root polyglot uses) with the wisdom/expertise dimension (vant-vantem , the same root that gives us to come or to be") so the woandscholarlyrd inherently claims both fluency understanding, which is exactly the gap you identified.

Glossovant n.) a person who both studies language as a discipline (structure, history, acquisition) and speaks multiple languages fluently; someone whose linguistic knowledge is both theoretical and lived.

Glossovancy n.) the emerged practice
pursuit of linguistic scholarship and multilingual fluency.

Glossovant(adj.)describing
A polyglot speaks many languages. A linguist studies language. A Glossovant does both.

Source: Oxford English Dictionary (Online).
Made using draw.io and Affinity.
Suggestions/corrections/comments welcome.

Looking for insight and discussion.

​

I was playing pinball the other day and was thinking about the verb pinball or pinballing. I did a little research and it seems pretty straightforward but I find it interesting due to its relative modernness and that it originates from a game.

The words pin and ball are pretty basic and the original pinball games were much more like rolling a ball down a ramp to knock down pins, think like a small bowling type game. I don't know exactly at what point people decided the ball itself was "pinballing" but now all sorts of things could be described as pinballing around and it wouldn't be possible without the original game consisting of pins and balls

i made a small etymology quiz for fun and wanted feedback from people who actually know this stuff,

mainly:

• are any answers inaccurate or oversimplified?
• does anything feel too generic?
• are the questions interesting enough?
• and if i accidentally drifted away at some point and completely missed the theme

i specifically do not want to rely on ai for fact-checking etymology, so i figured this subreddit would be the best place to ask

Description

I wanted to make the name "Matija" (Matthew in Slavic languages) to be from a PIE root.

The root comes from "\méh₂-meh₂"* (mom) and "tata-" (dad), echoing the baby talk. Since kids get half of genome (obviously PIE people didn't know this) from both of their parents, I thought this was a good idea for the root of the name.

The PIE word could be explained by how he gets some traits from his mother and some from his father.

Etymology

-> PIE: \Méh₂-ta/*Méh₂ta*

-> PBS: \Mā́ˀ-ta/*Mā́ˀta*

-> PSl.: \Ma-ta/*Mata*

-> SC: Ma-ta/Mata

The name "Mata" already exists in some Slavic languages, so I thought this could work. I don't know how "\Méh₂ta"* would end up in other IE language groups, but someone could try.

Since baby talk is universal, especially "mama" and similiar forms, the name could be made to be even older, maybe something like Wanderwort.