They kept making them even after I stopped watching them, and now they made even more, at such a late hour that some of the cast are ambulatory skeletons and the rest have AARP cards. I grew up in the "historical period" Stranger Things takes place in, so there's always a certain amount of stuff you just gotta put up with I guess. The things that bother me are - for the sixteen year old that lives here - pure retro candy. But, seriously though: I was under the impression that we all thought season three was kinda ahh.
I should emphasize that I didn't mean to type "ehh" and then mistakenly typed "ahh." I was always nervous that I wouldn't be exposed to cutting edge language and music when I began to traverse senescence en route to a hastily dug grave. It didn't happen that way! It happened another, different way.
I was there in the early planning stages of a couple organisms, and now that those creatures conduct themselves throughout the worlds - both the digimal, and the other one - they often return home with cultural product, along with various lexoid burrs and subconscious context. Various reclamation projects have rendered slurs I wouldn't even type, slurs I thought we had murdered in the manner of Saint George of Lydda, newly arisen as marks of warm camaraderie. 4chan ops denatured and joyously deployed by the people they were meant to scourge, the jagged barbs worn away through use.
Just as an aside: I sincerely hope that "getting cracked," another new term for having sex, isn't derived from Fortnite. I hope and pray. Gaming shit is incredibly ascendant from a lexical perspective and so it probably is but still.
TikTok in particular has a habit of supplanting vital words with babytalk, because words like "killed" are thought to suppress your videos - gatekeeping you from the coveted FYP. Brenna and I disagree sharply on whether these censorship-wrought distortions constitute authentic slang. She thinks this topic is dumb and does not want to talk about it any more. It is manifestly true that new language has been manufactured because it sees common use, I don't disagree with that part. I just think it's grotesque to speak in a concussed way about "seggs" and "unaliving" and "pew pews" and I think it's odd to frame it as some kind of organic choice. I think making people sound stupid when they talk about important shit is a pretty amazing flex, and offering them "enhanced reach" as payment for these conformities verges on the diabolical.
In any case, I had seen "ass" rendered as "ahh" by young people on apps I'm probably too old for. Like many modern innovations in this vein, I'm confident it was stolen from Hip-Hop. The young have simply repurposed it as a chat-usable softening of the word "Ass." I had only ever seen it written - but when Ronia said ahh verbally, when it leapt from the screen into physical speech, I tilted my head like a cocker spaniel.
Ass isn't especially naughty in the modern world, where the old F-Word barely has any valence at all and the new F-Word is a mark of affection, like the Australian C-Word, another word I would never say. Ass barely coheres in such an environment, which is why it's funny to try and smuggle it inside another word at all.
Ehh, God dammit. Brenna is probably right.
(CW)TB out.
