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I could imagine saying "God, are you seeing this?" to playfully emphasize something sinful they're seeing. Or similarly "Hey FBI, did you know about this?" to playfully point out that something is (or seems) illegal. Or someone says "Mike Tyson isn't that great a fighter" and someone else pretends to look at someone behind them and go "Hey Mike, what do you think about that?". It's all kinda just pretending some other entity is watching these events for humor, and I think it's all just 2nd person.

Or you could say something like "Chat likes it when I rap", but that's similar to "God likes it when I genuflect after making a touchdown" or something -- it's just standard 3rd person with a flair.

People have a tendency to over-emphasize how unique new speech patterns are. This same thing happened with "literally" being English's first "auto-antonym" -- it wasn't really, it was just a slightly different form of sarcasm. "OMG I literally died! Like I'm genuinely dead now. None of you are hearing this because I'm totes a corpse. I'm completely serious you guys, I literally have no pulse anymore." -- I can imagine all of that being in the same vein, but it's hard to argue that that means "genuinely" and "totes" and "completely" are all auto-antonyms too. Or that "riiiiiight" is an auto-antonym because it actually means "wrong". Things just aren't that new in language.



Ahhhh yeah I see what you mean. I'm probably thinking a bit too literally about 2nd person vs 3rd person. My example is an imaginary side conversation, where "you" = "Chat", so it's 2nd person, but the intent to me "feels" third person when spoken, as chat/God/Mike etc would never refer to someone in the room. (not that it matters in the context of labeling something 1st/2nd/3rd person in this case though) That's what's messing me up I think. Sorry about that.

And your God example, yeah maybe this is not a new linguistic phenomenon haha. I can very much imagine some middle age priests taking a jab at one another with "God, are you seeing this?" as father Percival takes another swig from the hip flask.




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