I've been using variations of "jawn" or "jawns" as my username for 20+ years.
It's a word that has endured surprisingly well, as slang goes. And it's a conspicuously egalitarian term. You'll find it used in both blue-collar and white-collar settings, and across racial lines. There's very little tribal attachment. Nobody cares if you appropriate it. The general sentiment is the more jawn users, the better.
But unfortunately, I'm afraid it may have jumped the shark when the "Jawn Morgan" billboards started appearing:
ehhhh I disagree. I definitely cringe when I hear a hipster who's lived here for 2 years try to inject jawn into every conversation. Feels very forced. Also Jawn being put on pins and shirts is also very cringe to me
> when I hear a hipster who's lived here for 2 years try to inject jawn into every conversation. Feels very forced.
Same thing happens with "y'all", even though it's nowhere close to being as esoteric/regional. A couple years ago, Twitter seemed to have become obsessed with incorporating it conspicuously into every other tweet. I didn't even know "y'all" had rules until that happened. (I couldn't really tell you what those rules are, but it was popping up in places that were so syntactically awkward, by people who were clearly not "y'all" natives. So they definitely exist.)
I love ya'll because second person plural is something that English annoying lacks.
I'm also a fan of habitual be because it's something that can be expressed in English, but it sounds verbose or relies on context whereas "I be" is self explanatory without any context -you know that the speakers means "I regularly do/feel ___ "
My favorite phrase puts them together: "ya'll be trippin" is IMO the most efficient way in the English language to tell a group of people that their behavior is unacceptable.
On the one hand "yous" fills this void in a way that is more consistent with the rules of pluralizing words, but on the other hand it also introduces a homophone with "use" which could hypothetically lead to confusion. So which is worse, inconsistency (y'all) or ambiguity (yous)?
Ultimately, since "yous" never fits in the same grammatical slot as "use" (different part of speech), there's never any real chance at confusion anyway. Therefore I weigh in on the side of "yous".
Once again New York has it right and the rest of yous be trippin.
Sentences that end with a y’all still come across as distinctly Southern. Sentences that begin with y’all, on the other hand, sound normal or dare I say even hip. To me that is.
"I definitely cringe" and "Also ... is also ... very cringe to me"
You certainly get plenty of mileage out of the word cringe. Is it a verb, is it an adjective - who knows? Your also ... also construct riffs on "either ... or", "both ... and" and the like. There must be a name for terms like that - you get them in Latin too so they've been around for a while eg nec ... necque (neither ... nor).
Jawn is just a colloquialism but I've seen also ... also several times before now. I've also seen very cringe too.
I am not taking the piss but I feel that I am watching language evolve right in front of me. I suspect that whilst this article and set of threads gets itself all whizzed up over jawn, it is missing the rather bigger point about language and conversations that travel at the speed of light instead of just sound and is distributed by the internet and not just the post office.
On HN we pontificators have an audience that a Roman Imperator could only dream of.
you'd have to be blind and deaf not to notice that gradual downhill slide of popular vocabulary. It may have been said with a bit more grace, but they're not wrong either.
"Gee, 20% of this paragraph is the same word, perhaps it would serve me well to mix it up."
Yeah. I feel like there's two types of people that actually use jawn: those that are very Philly and those that are trying, really, really hard to sound Philly. I can't say I've said jawn with a straight face since I was a little kid.
For Boston/Mass it's "wicked." You can tell when someone injects it naturally and they grew up with its various contexts, or you're a new transplant and it's usually used in every other sentence.
I was the latter circa 2012 but ~8 years in Boston tempered my use, haha.
Thingy, whatsit, whatchermacallit - there are loads of these words. “Jawn” may have slight differences in the way that it is used when compared with “whatsit”, but it doesn’t seem very different. “Dongle” used to be used this way (by the person who invented the copy-protection dongle, who then repurposed the word). And then there’a the old faithful Latin “re”.
From your reference it can also be used as a verb, which is dope.
I kind of think that there must be a vast amount of Filipino culture I don't know about. Big population, but little penetration of the culture in mainland USA.
That comes from "huevón", which is... really hard to explain in English. The Argentine "boludo" and "pelotudo" are in the same vein, and mean roughly the same non-sensical thing.
I'm not sure if the etymology is that an egg ("huevo") looks like a zero, so a dumb person or a loser is a "huevo" (an egg, meaning a zero) or "huevón" (huge zero), or if it has to do with testicles (because in Spanish it's common to call them eggs), so a "huevón" might someone who's "as dumb as a giant testicle". "Boludo" and "pelotudo" are more like the latter, for sure, though they could still derived from zero looking like a ball.
> The "w" sound keeps repeating in the themes here, interesting.
In weón it's really just a slight change from huevón, and mostly just dropping the 'v'.
Yes, the word came to be used as an euphemism because of its genericity, not the other way around. If the context doesn't suggest otherwise it is not considered impolite.
I grew up 10 minutes from Philadelphia, and I distinctively remember kids I know starting to say jawn in the mid 90s. I was like wait are you saying joint, as in a spike lee joint? and they were like no it's jawn. Around the same time everyone changed the emphasized word in the phrase "yeah it is" when in agreement. More recently it reminds me how people switched to "all the sudden" all of a sudden.
I was raised in south jersey, about 30m from Philly, and I remember exactly when jawn hit our little town, right around Y2K. I was in 9th grade at the time, and I remember it being like an arms race where people were throwing jawns out at every little thing, regardless of necessity. I also remember it pissed off a couple of the "cool kids" who were actively trying to coin "gwat" with the other students. It had some legs at first, but jawn came along and everyone forgot gwat.
I was visiting Birmingham when "safe" was taking off in England (2006?) but hadn't reached Scotland yet. Was talking to a random guy in a bar, and I couldn't understand why he was so insistent that Birmingham was "safe"
"laters" would just be a short way of saying "see you later" - but it sounds really a bit lame and try-hard to me, or the kind of thing a middle-aged, middle-class person would write as dialogue for a working class urban teenage character in a TV show. I think quickthrower2 is saying the same thing but maybe they can correct me (sounds like they're England, so they'll know better than me).
Don't worry about either, you won't hear them particularly often :)
Yeah I feel everyone around me who used this word added a bit of a "t" sound to the end. It wasn't until I was an adult I saw it spelled out like "jawn".
"Dude can be anything. Males are dude. Females are dude. My phone is dude. That cat over there, it is dude. The green light that only lasts long enough for 1 car to pass is dude. I have called my hair "dude". I have called my coffee maker "dude". The entire population of the world, and all of their belongings, are all dude."
- Some post on Reddit
Is "dude" quite as flexible, though? It seems to me like its generic use is only valid when you're actually just personifying an object. For example, with my phone I might say:
> Come on dude, why are you so slow
> My old dude lasted me 6 years
> I love this dude
But I wouldn't say any of these things:
> I lost my dude earlier, can you call it?
> I spent $600 on this dude
> Don't you have your dude on you?
I'm a Brit, reflecting on the American dialect I've picked up, so I very much could be wrong. I'd be intrigued to know if you really do use "dude" like that.
The rule it seems to me is you have to be pointing at the thing or making a clear reference to it. This dude right here is okay, some dude you own, while talking about some offscreen object, much weirder.
As a transplant to Philly for college from VA, Philadelphia definitely sits in a weird area when it comes to their cultural contributions. New York does their best to make sure people from Philly know they aren't allowed to be culturally relevant like they do with New Jersey so there's a little bit of mixing of culture from Philly to NJ. It has Baltimore to bully in a similar way as NYC does but evidence of the culture is obvious. Jersey club as a music genre is wholly from Baltimore but obviously influenced from Philadelphia.
But its influence seems to be completely stopped at DC, where people from Philly "who made it" but not in NYC try to show they aren't from Philly.
I lived there through college, and never felt any influence to pick up the slang since it seemed to just exist in a bubble that was ridiculed from all sides. I would say I wanted a hoagie at the store, because they would pretend they didn't know what a sub was, but thats about it.
But jawn seems like the most boring word that online articles like to talk about. Its obviously prevalent but its also not unknown and actually fairly common. When I was in Philly earlier this year a lawyer's ad on the radio used it prevalently to try and show some kind of connection to the city. Its kind of unique but uninteresting, similar to a broccoli rabe sandwich bloggers rave about since the best cheesesteaks in the city have basically been established for decades now.
Now an article explaining 'actin jo (joe??)' I'd love to read about because I've never gotten a straight answer on that, but have seen fights get started because one girl said it to another.
Uncountable, e.g. "look at all this shit in my truck". I cannot count all the shit. For countable plural I will use the form "shits", e.g. "these two shits left their bikes on my lawn".
I think whatever "linguists" did this "research" must be undergraduate internet searchers. For example in Russian the words "fignya/fignyushka" or the less polite "huynya/huynyushka" are used in a very similar way. They are a noun representing an abstract "thing" that the listener would understand from context.
I don’t think so. When I read that I don’t substitute the proper words in my head as I would with jawn. Also, “whatever” sounds negative to my ear, whereas jawn would be taken neutrally.
> The word “jawn” is unlike any other English word. In fact, according to the experts that I spoke to, it’s unlike any other word in any other language. It is an all-purpose noun, a stand-in for inanimate objects, abstract concepts, events, places, individual people, and groups of people.
Same although haven't been there for many years and still I never heard lawn once from my parents, my relatives or myself. Is there a more localized area of Philly that uses it - my family covers south and west Philly.
Jawn is useful for readability, but also provides an easy performance benefit too. Iterators for `std::unordered_map` will have the proper `const` values and the compiler won’t need to do any implicit conversions.
Trying to demonstrate that you can't replace literally any word with it?
'const' is more a qualifier or an adjective than an object/thing. You wouldn't s/fast/jawn/ in the sentence "a fast car", like you can't replace const in "a const iterator"
It's a word that has endured surprisingly well, as slang goes. And it's a conspicuously egalitarian term. You'll find it used in both blue-collar and white-collar settings, and across racial lines. There's very little tribal attachment. Nobody cares if you appropriate it. The general sentiment is the more jawn users, the better.
But unfortunately, I'm afraid it may have jumped the shark when the "Jawn Morgan" billboards started appearing:
https://billypenn.com/2022/05/25/jawn-morgan-billboards-phil...