You know those euphemistic words like “muck up” for “fuck up”, “shite” for “shit”, or “unalive” for “suicide” that people use to circumvent the rules of major platforms like YouTube and Tiktok? I just thought about how people are starting to use them on other platforms and in real live out of habit. But they only make sense in this very specific context, that a majority of communication takes place on privately owned, strictly regulated internet platforms that ban certain words.

If for whatever reason the details of how the platforms worked get lost (and they might, because it’s so centralised that all it takes is for a handful of major companies to go under and take all the content they host with them), it’ll be difficult to retroactively figure out what the culture of the 2020s looked like and where all those weird words suddenly came from.

  • XeroxCool@lemmy.world
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    8 hours ago

    Since everyone is excited to point out the pre-existence of shite and muck, I’ll share the one I thought was a computer age typo but wasn’t: finna. “I’m finna get dinner”. I swore it was a keyboard typo of “gonna” with G and O shifted one key to the left working itself into verbal vernacular. Instead, “gonna” is to “going to” as “finna” is to “fixing to”. Just as OP hasn’t heard British slang, this was something I hadn’t heard from US Southern slang

  • Chainweasel@lemmy.world
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    12 hours ago

    Muck and Shite have been in common usage in the UK for more than a century before the Internet was even a thing

    • givesomefucks@lemmy.world
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      13 hours ago

      I’m fairly certain “muck up” was the original and people just started using “fuck up” because it rhymes…

    • corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca
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      5 hours ago

      I’m not sure it’s not intentional.

      Odds are it’s an embarrassing spelling mistake, but let’s see how this plays out.

  • Today@lemmy.world
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    14 hours ago

    People have always said muck up and shite. Unalive is goofy and will hopefully fade.

    • Postmortal_Pop@lemmy.world
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      10 hours ago

      You know how it’s a common misconception that in the early days of cinema people were fleeing the theatre because they thought the oncoming train was real?

      Someday, they’re going to think we were all Charizarding each other during the height of the Pokemon craze and that’s where all these “sick burns” come from.