They drop into our In boxes like mad, twitching flies, these contests apparently designed to make us feel either startlingly young or hopelessly old and out of it. It’s either “How many of these ancient pieces of technology did you use?” or “How well do you know 2014 Pop Culture?” I pass on most of them, but when our editor sent me The New York Times’s Language Quiz, I took the bait.
Designed to test “how linguistically en vogue you are,” the quiz provides multiple-choice definitions for various neologisms of the Twitter age. What was intriguing to me about it wasn’t so much my score, which was as middling as I’d have expected, but the challenge of figuring out the provenance of the various coinages—which surely, like most coinages, either evolved without much reflection on the part of the users or burst spontaneously from some hastily composed text and then oozed through the blogosphere.
Spoiler Alert. If you want to take this test yourself, do it now, before I reveal half the answers.
Yolo feels like a classic. First, it’s an acronym—“you only live once”—and second, it trips onomatopoeically off the tongue, so you sound a little giddy when you say (or write) it. Much better than lol, which I’ve never known how to pronounce. This one was easy for me, but I paused anyway to consider the false choices the Times offered. The first, “a Western tie,” is of course a bolo, a term my twenty-somethings never heard of, it having been popularized by Clint Eastwood in Coogan’s Bluff, circa 1968. The second choice, “you’re low,” plays on the assumption that these trendy expressions are coming from some kind of faux-gangsta talk, an easy trap into which a middle-aged nerd trying to be hip could fall.
Unbothered is kind of a trick question; think too much, as I did, and you’ll get it wrong. The first choice is “bothered,” which brings to mind those reverse-meaning phrases like “I could care less”; and in our ironic age, fronting one’s botheration with the negative of the word would seem a logical maneuver. The second choice, “clean, tidy,” made sense to me as a young person’s evasion of words his or her mother would have used to describe, let’s say, a well-made bed. In fact, the correct choice is apparently the obvious definition, “unfazed.” Unbothered isn’t really a coinage, in that we can probably add “un-“ to anything we like (unrestful, un-creepy, etc.); and why create a longer word when a short one’s available? I don’t know, but my hunch leans toward the same British influence seen in the next word, joggers, which are pants used to go jogging, much as trainers, in Brit English, are shoes used for athletic training.
Nothing special in the definition of rekt, though I suppose someone could mistake it for an acronym of “Real Early K—(?) Time,” and check the false answer “real early.” It’s an alternate spelling of “wrecked,” which seemed right to me. (“To puke” was way-too-obvious bait for oldsters who think of college students drinking.) But more interesting was the word’s origin in online gaming and its association with pwned, a term I’d never understood and felt prompted, by its inclusion in the answer’s explanation, to look up. Seems pwned (pronounced poaned) originated not in an alternate spelling but in a typographical misspelling, of owned, by a designer creating the online game World of Warcraft. (This was, apparently, before spell checkers came into play.) If you were beaten by the game, you were meant to be owned, but instead you were pwned. Poker players, many of them veterans of video games, took up the term and spread it far enough that a website now exists, haveibeenpwned.com, where you can check if your email firewall has been breached.
My favorite, however, has to be on fleek, both because it’s gone so instantly viral (and will surely, like a butterfly, live out its few days of glory, lay its eggs, and die) and because it makes no etymological sense. Neither does on flick, which many initially thought 16-year-old Peaches Monroee was trying to say in the 12-second video in which she described her newly waxed eyebrows’ perfection as on fleek. For what it’s worth, half the other words in the video made no sense to me, either because I don’t know the slang of Chicago’s south side or because Peaches (as she explained to Merriam-Webster) likes to make up new words. Fleek lends itself to the vowel lengthening of words like Hiiii, Soooo, and Reeeally; it’s easy to imagine supra-perfection rendered as on fleeeek!. Plus, the sounds are fun to say—the fl to start with, the various ways of pronouncing that long e sound, and the quick explosion of the k. I’ll miss on fleek when it’s gone, even though I just learned it for the first time in this quiz.
But I’m still not taking that quiz about commercial jingles for food. I feel stupid enough already, thank you.
