Skip Navigation
chapotraphouse @hexbear.net
doublepepperoni [none/use name] @hexbear.net

Children, stop writing ahh instead of ass I beg you

This shit drives me up the wall even more than "unalive"

You can't stop people saying slurs but an entire generation will subconsciously alter their entire vocabulary because they grew up on corporate platforms with very heavily moderated text chats and comment sections and they ended up internalising the filters

Edit: I was not aware of the AAVE origins of "ahh" which pushes it more towards the territory of legit slang. Still, I stand by my general point about automated moderation influencing language being bad

78 comments

  • Learning that "goofy ahh" is a lameass self-censorship of goofy-ass is so fucking disappointing. I just learned this a couple days ago, I didn't know what it meant but I figured it had some different meaning. Instead it's goddamn self-censorship just like "unalive".

  • It really grates me how corporate censorship is making people talk some weird sort of baby language. You can't talk about how Israel is following in the footsteps of the Nazis led by Adolf Hitler in killing the innocent, you have to say that the blue state is following in the footsteps of the the yatzees led by Moustache Man in unaliving the innocent which kind of removes the gravity of the message. It is ridiculous.

    This is different from slang, AAVE and other kinds of -lect. Those are cool and awesome. If people would say it if the algorithm wasn't listening in on them it is fine.

    I don't even know how much of this self-censorship is really substantiated. On one hand you have creators who seems to be afraid that bad things will happen if they talk about cutting up a carrot, on the other hand you have creators who say shit and fuck and c*nt in every sentence and they're doing fine.

    • One thing Georg Oreo was right about was the control of language to make people unable to express more complex thoughts, but like the rest of his work, it was all just projection of what capitalism does.

  • while we’re here, I wanna air my personal grievance with the use of “based” in internet culture. That term is reserved for our lord and savior, Lil B and I’m fairly certain it originated as a term for crackhead (i.e “basehead”). Possibly coming from the term “free basing” meaning to take drugs orally with no casing.

    I have no sources so prove me wrong lol

    • Wiktionary says, "A reference to freebase cocaine, via basehead. Coined by American rapper from California Lil B to describe his lifestyle."

      Lil B himself said about the word, "Based means being yourself. Not being scared of what people think about you. Not being afraid to do what you wanna do. Being positive. When I was younger, based was a negative term that meant like dopehead, or basehead. People used to make fun of me. They was like, "You're based." They'd use it as a negative. And what I did was turn that negative into a positive. I started embracing it like, "Yeah, I'm based." I made it mine. I embedded it in my head. Based is positive."

      I personally still occasionally use the word based in the same manner as it is otherwise commonly used in Internet culture, which does deviate a bit from the sense in which Lil B originally coined the term. It doesn't strike me as particularly problematic to say based, but maybe my State Policy on Usage of Terms Originating in Marginalized Englishes isn't doing as good a job at keeping out cultural appropriation as it's supposed to.

  • When you describe it like that then yes, that is a hell world you are describing. Im absolutely unable to censor myself. That’s why I’m here.

78 comments