Extremely-online language is the Shein of slang, or: why do all celebrities sound Like That? The Retro Report, vol. 2
PLUS: RETRO RECS TO REPLENISH THE WORD WELLS IN OUR MINDS!!!
Last week, I promised we would be getting into why everyone’s face looks Like That. And we WILL. But first we must discuss why every famous person sounds Like That. And by That, I mean This:
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The original text to which Ayo refers in this interview is almost exempt from the thing I’m talking about—that is, Ayo wrote “I’m simply too seated” in an Instagram caption1 and it became copypasta. It was born on the internet and it lives, still, on the internet.
But everything else they’re saying—I would say it’s really the “my brother in Christ”2 that clinches it—is part of a bizarro modern linguistic trajectory: phrases of the internet, taken out of their online home and brought into the real world, but with the intention of returning to their original state of online. That is, the conversation above, despite taking place in person, is not really meant for any in-person audience. It is meant to be consumed in its final form: as online content. Everything is Online and interviews like this one are but a brief sojourn away from being Online. For internet thou art, and unto internet thou shalt return.
As a result, everything Ayo and Andrew are saying in that interview sounds incredibly strange, because these phrases were never really meant to be said aloud. Alas, say it aloud they must: Everything in the celebrity promotional universe, no matter where it actually takes place—on a late night show, a red carpet, a magazine interview, a press junket—is designed for its inevitable, ultimate venue of consumption: as internet chum, on your phone. We are dealing with the verbal equivalent of stars wearing stage makeup all the time, which looks just right under those bright lights from your seat in the back row but seems totally absurd the minute the show is over, when seen from literally any other vantage point.
WHY are they doing this? The ability to be, create, speak in, and/or demonstrate your awareness of memes is central to the work of modern celebrity. The goal of every media interaction is to come away with some memeable thing—the Wicked “holding space” finger-grab; “Sorry to this man”—that will spread across the internet, doing promo for the promo which in turn is doing promo for the work. Credit where it is due: Ayo and Andrew are both exceptionally good at this, and clearly they understand that part of being “good” at being a celebrity entails performing how online you are and your fluency in the internet-isms of the day. A fun corollary of this is a theory of mine that some movies should actually just be press tours. (Is After the Hunt one such movie? Haven’t seen it yet… if you have, let me know!)
For what it’s worth, I do think some of this is genuine—a lot of famous people need to log off and simply cannot—and some of this is a performance, as in, stars want us to forget that they lead these extremely unusual, bubble-wrapped lives in which their young assistants have to tell them what’s trending and post on their behalf because they don’t even have their own social media passwords. Most stars would rather us see them as existing in the world in the same way that we do (via constant scrolling).
Still, this is embarrassing for everyone involved but particularly so (in my opinion) for the obviously-offline and/or any actor old enough to remember dial-up. It is also why we see so many instances of annoying confusion when a star who is obviously too old (in a good way!) to be that online is spoken to, by an interviewer, in the absurdist-hyperbole speak of the internet, especially when the words in question have real meaning and connotations in reality that they’ve been scrubbed of online (e.g. “unhinged,” “deranged,” “chaotic”).
What does this have to do with us mere non-famous mortals? Celebrity behavior is a harbinger of what’s to come for the masses. Their norms become our norms, whether we like it or not. (The arena where you likely experience and notice this the most is in beauty culture: Botox as an increasingly-common part of the average person’s skincare routine; normies getting lip filler.)
And why do we CARE? Partly, honestly, because it is boring: By the time any of these meme-terms achieve mainstream adoption, they feel ancient to anyone who knew about them from the get-go. I’d say the most high-profile example of this is “era”—the term, largely though not exclusively TikTok-based, used to melodramatically herald a person’s entrance into a new stage of life (a villain era, a Sopranos era)—which I wrote about for the Washington Post in August 2022. Three months later, Taylor Swift announced her “Eras” tour, remaking this bit of slang in her own image. Three years later, “eras” has lost all its fun, online-only bite, and sounds so old as to be practically carbon-dated.
Internet lingo ages like milk. It’s basically the Shein of slang; it wears out upon arrival. But/and—like those cheap polyester products—it also never really goes away or biodegrades. We are going to be hearing artists get asked about their “eras” for years to come. I wonder if we will ever move on from “vibes.” E! news hosts will, one day (hopefully MANY moons from now), gather at the fringes of Pedro Pascal’s funeral and ask mourners if a ghost can still be “daddy.”
Yes, yes: Language is dynamic and all the old words were once new. My name didn’t even really exist until Shakespeare wrote The Merchant of Venice. (Was “Jessica” the “Chase Infiniti” of the late 1590s??) I am not opposed! Adapt or perish, as a fellow time-travel novelist would say. There’s just something about the tenor of online discourse—how everything on the internet is built for the interests and appetites of, basically, an easily-distracted and intellectually-incurious adolescent—that means the result of everyone adopting an online lexicon for their everyday lives is, at least for the time being, everybody sounding sort of inane.
This, speaking of Taylor, is one of the reasons why her attempts to deploy sliiiightly out of date internet-speak on her latest album sound so clunky and off (“every eldest daughter3 was the first lamb to the slaughter/so we all dressed up as wolves and we looked fire”). And I do wonder how songs that rely heavily on meme-speak—like the verse in “Manchild” in which Sabrina Carpenter muses, “why so sexy if so dumb? And how survive the earth so long?”—are going to sound even two years from now.
As for audiences: If you aren’t on TikTok, Twitter, or Instagram… does any of this even make sense to you? Or do the latest rounds of celebrity promo sound completely incoherent? Drop me a line, leave a comment, let me know your thoughts!
RETRO RECS TO HEAL WHAT AILS YOU (EXTREMELY-ONLINE LANGUAGE EXHAUSTION EDITION)
How do we replenish the word well in our minds when so much of our time is spent in the scroll, flattening the way we talk (and think and feel etc. etc.)?? The theme of this week’s RETRO RECS is: DELIGHTING IN LANGUAGE.
What’s What: A Visual Glossary of the Physical World
This big ol’ textbook-looking WONDER is exactly what the title promises it will be: labeled diagrams of literally everything, starting with the universe and working its way down.
This book is just beautiful, detailed illustrations of everything under the sun with all their pieces-parts identified by their proper terms. This an extremely useful book to have around if you are ever writing a novel (hypothetically speaking) and want to be able to describe things without falling back on the same old dull words you’ve used all your life. Do you want to be able to identify, with unimpeachable specificity, the thoroughbrace of the rear wheel of a horse-drawn carriage, or the lunar overshoe of an astronaut’s spacesuit, or the mammalian names of the various parts of an offshore rig (monkey board, doghouse)? This is what What’s What is all about!
Remember those Eyewitness Books from your 1990s childhood (or your 1990s children’s childhoods) that were full of those great glossy photographs and illustrations of knights or shipwrecks or big cats? And you’d flip through and learn things about tiger teeth and T-rex arms and pirate ships and think of how vast and thrilling the world was? This is that, for adults. Fill your brain with new terms for old things! Feel that satisfying coin-drop in the mind when you stumble upon the word you never knew you were looking for!
Check out Thriftbooks for a well-loved copy; you can also find some decent-condition hardcover editions on Ebay.
Ball of Fire (1941), dir. Howard Hawks
A fantastic screwball comedy featuring one of my favorite tropes of the genre—a tightly-wound guy gets his world turned upside-down by a woman who annoys and dazzles him into falling in love with her (see also: Bringing Up Baby)—with a perfectly ridiculous premise: A bunch of academics have been locked in their study for nine years writing an encyclopedia but get stuck when they realize, due to their self-imposed scholarly seclusion, their entry for “slang” is woefully out of date.
To correct for this cluelessness, the grammarian Professor Bertram Potts (Gary Cooper!!) enlists the assistance of the smoking hot nightclub performer and gal-about-town Sugarpuss O’Shea (Barbara Stanwick, SENSATIONAL4) who incidentally needs a place to hide out until some troubles blow over for her gangster boyfriend, a mob boss named Joe Lilac (the NAMES in this picture… YES). As an extra treat: everything Stanwick wears in this movie was designed by THE Edith Head. Also: Sugarpuss demonstrates an extremely cute, news-you-can-use technique for kissing someone who is much taller than you.
Watch it on Amazon Prime (streaming) or Apple (rentable) OR join me in the physical media revolution and start getting DVDs for FREE from your PUBLIC LIBRARY!!
A Word A Day emails
True vocabulary freaks know there is no delight quite like discovering a new word and adopting it as your own. Sure, you can just go around listening and reading and whatnot and hope to stumble across a great one in the wild—and of COURSE you’re doing that, we’re ALL doing that—but let me put you onto something that will bring some gorgeous new lingo directly to you: A WORD A DAY EMAILS!
Every email will treat you to: a word and its pronunciation, etymology, notes on its history and/or modern day context, and a usage example. Each week has a different theme. Last week’s was “words with a bossy past” (gardyloo, halleuljah, dekko, noli me tangere, and lampoon).
Are you bored and craving a scroll but don’t want to do Bad Scroll? Treat yourself to a scroll through the AWAD archives! “Words with double lives?” YES. A few weeks ago, the theme was “insults.” FUN. Before that we got “toponyms.” Every so often the theme is something like “there’s a word for that” and you’ll find out that (for instance) the next time you’re struggling to make a decision, you can just say you have abulia (rhymes with JULIA)!
I have been receiving A Word A Day emails since the dawn of email. We’re talking AOL “you’ve got mail” times, people. All thanks to my DAD, one of the most devoted word-lovers I know. He and I are still on the AWAD train all these years later and you can join us there. These emails are free (though you can always make a donation if you’re so inclined) thanks to the good people at Wordsmith.org.
Ayo used to drop these beautiful online pearls all the time on her Letterboxd, but then she got too famous and had to shut it all down. I miss reviews like this!! Unfortunately the more famous you are, the less interesting you get to be. If you saw Tina Fey’s “I don’t think so, honey,” on Las Culturistas, you already know this to be true! That is, UNLESS your whole shtick is being interesting, which is of course limiting in its own way and no matter; ultimately the stakes of the whole operation will make it not worth a person’s while to be human (as in: flawed, containing multitudes) in public. The machinery of celebrity will bulldoze any strangeness into something more easily consumable for the imagined average audience. Bummer!!!
I know what the more offline among you are thinking: “My brother in Christ” predates the internet by a LOT. But Andrew is almost certainly invoking the Twitter meme from ~2022 or (even MORE likely, imo) the first half of the popular TikTok audio, also from 2022: “My brother in Christ, you are scaring the hoes!” Which—I’m no New Testament scholar, but I feel like is not the original usage?? I don’t remember it coming up when Andrew was promoting Silence (2016). GREAT movie though! Save it for when the clocks turn back and it gets dark at 4 p.m.
It feels EXTREMELY obvious that this is just Taylor pulling the meme from the air in an awkward grab at relevance (which is frankly beneath a star of her wattage; when will she learn that it’s her job to SET the zeitgeist, not chase it?). But I also must add that you can’t refer to yourself as “your English teacher” and then make the grammatical error of calling yourself the “eldest daughter” when you are (1) the elder sibling (Taylor has one brother) and (2) the ONLY daughter! You can’t be the eldest of two!!! This is even more grating to me than “If I was a man, then I’d be the man,” even though that is also wrong. Artists can make grammatical errors in lyrics with INTENTION (I mean, imagine if the Rolling Stones had been sticklers about that sort of thing; we’d never have “Satisfaction,” what a TRAGEDY) but I fear that is… not what’s happening here.
Just don’t read the “political views” section of her Wikipedia :-/
How would you accept the argument that the celebrities nowadays are also just meeting the quality of the interviewer?
Like a lot of these press tours are 1) so tedious that itd be easier to just ramble in brainrot platitudes 2) half of these "interviewers" are like 1 to 2 steps removed from the tiktok stuff themselves 2a/3) people routinely suggest that the Hot Wings guy is like the only good interviewer in the business rn because hes the only one *clearly doing research* and I wonder if that's what makes all the difference.