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
The other side to this is that ahh for ass is an eye dialect for certain AAVE lects (e.g. in this version of “Crank That” by Soulja Boy, “I’m jockin’ on yo b#### ahh”)
Incidentally, I saw a short by Unsightly Opinions today where she was talking about cutting food as a blind person, but she couldn’t say either “cut” or “knife”, and thus circumlocuted them as “make food smaller” and “implement”. I’m reminded of Oceanian name taboos, except instead being a product of worshiping ancestors it’s a product of worshiping The Algorithm.
“cut” or “knife”
I was confused for a moment then realised those words are probably on a no-no list because of violence or self-harm associations
This shit is grim
It’s fucking hilarious how there legit is a fuckton of censorship everywhere but chuds yelling slurs is mysteriously exempt.
They can post swastikas but the guy who calls them a “stupid jerk” gets banned for using what are now considered swear words.
Calling someone a jerk is mean and disruptive
Promoting national socialism is just expressing a political opinion
Literally 1984, but people still think its eevul cpu and tankies that are doing it.
but she couldn’t say either “cut” or “knife”
I don’t get this. I was searching YouTube to find a video of a feral hog one time and all the videos were like, “Killing feral hogs with (model of gun)” and “Watch Jane kill 40 feral hogs in 30 minutes”. Presumably these are monetized videos because they had professional looking thumbnails and clickbaity titles.
How is it that you can’t say knife and be monetized but you can do an animal genocide on film? Is this overzealous self censorship or preferential treatment of gun channels?
The interesting thing is that “cut” was in the short’s title — so I think it was maybe originally posted to TikTok and was later posted to YouTube.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
I thought it was appropriated AAVE? Most of the “youth” language is.
Suburban white kids steal the language and fashion of black people but still walk across the street when a black person is walking in the opposite direction.
I think it’s a thing that originated in Philly?
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.
Yeah I’ve noticed this too, the universal acceptance for the most asinine form of self-censorship is utterly baffling considering the pseudo-libertarian meta of internet youth culture since the internet went public thirty years ago
I watched a youtube video recently about the GTA games and the dude was self censoring so hard. Wouldn’t say things like “suicide” or “killing yourself” in reference to jumping off a building in the game. Wouldn’t say words like “sex”, “boobs” and “prostitute” when talking about the strip clubs and street hookers.
It’s fucking stupid
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”.
this is the only thing I will be an old man about. I don’t give a shit about “aura” in all honesty but “ahh” “pmo” and “sbyau” genuinely pisses me off
Also, I’ve seen “keys” used in lieu of kys. what the actual fuck man
“pmo” and “sbyau”
I don’t really have a problem with acronyms tbh
I have the issue on the sole fact that I had no idea what it means, learning about it and forgetting right after, it’s not as memorable as wtf, lmao and lol to me
That kinda has to do more with brain plasticity than the old acronyms being better or worse though. We don’t learn as easily as we used to when we were younger so we forget what the acronyms mean.
cuh crashing out over ahh
Was this self-censorship? I thought it was just coopting AAVE again.
Whenever I’ve googled the phenomenon I’ve come across explanations like this
It is an algorithm-friendly way of saying “ass”, similar to how “unalive” is an algorithm-friendly way of saying “dead” or “suicide”. It’s self-censorship, although many of these terms evolve beyond censorship into “real words”/slang very quickly - especially when they’re being used by people and in places where being “TikTok/YouTube-friendly” is irrelevant.
On the other hand, I’m a pasty white nerd from Europe so I wouldn’t know
I think the corpo censorship helped it proliferate and stick around but I definitely believe the origin is AAVE
Ding ding ding.
What does this even sound like in real life
From the Soulja Boy song I linked in another comment, evidently it’s just pronounced /æ(ː)/ — so it rhymes with yeah, nah, and baa, when these words are pronounced with the TRAP vowel. What’s interesting is that /æ/ (TRAP vowel) is a checked vowel, and I have to wonder if that’s what allowed the /s/ to be dropped from ass in the first place: if the vowel already tells you that the next sound must be a consonant, then the consonant itself becomes a bit redundant. The other notable words that get the same treatment are bih and shii, which also have checked vowels. But I’m no AAVE linguist.
Edit: Yeah, in “Crank That”, Soulja Boy also very prominently elides the ends of words with free vowels, so I guess the checked vowel thing might’ve just been me noticing a pattern that wasn’t actually there. But who knows, maybe there’s internal variation — it’s not my dialect, I’ve never even been to the South where this sort of elision is most widespread.
/æ(ː)/ — so it rhymes with yeah, nah, and baa
Guess I’m confused because I see “ahh” and I read it as the a in “far” not as the a in “ass”
As I’m sure most people without context would, but there isn’t really a better way to spell it.
Are you from the US?
AAVE and I think southern american dialects in general tend to “erase” last letters of words. I have heard it enough to notice that pattern.
Yeah from what it looks like it sounds like how a lot of black folks pronounce ass, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was some Frankenstein’d abomination of both censorship and appropriation though.
Black folks say arse???
I just don’t get how you get ahh from ass
A lot of us don’t pronounce the -ss in ass so it sounds like a held ah-. If you know Japanese it’s like the っ in a word like natsu vs nattsu. It sounds almost like a pause in a sentence. Depending on the sentence it may also sound like aa instead. Thing is, we don’t really write it like that, at least up til my gen, idk bout these kids but it looks like a literal writing of the pronunciation. A similar thing is done with iono (don’t think that one is very common though) which stands for I don’t know and is based on the almost slurred together way it’s said from dropping consonants in speech.
“I unno” isn’t all that rare to see typed out
I’m familiar with the concept, but in my head I intuitively pronounced the a in “ahh” like car, not like cat
Oh, nah, I’m pretty sure it’s both depending on the region. AAVE has regional differences and I think that pronunciation is one of them
I do think the a in car is more common though, mostly has to do with how the predominant regional accent influences your pronunciation is my guess, but I’m not a massive linguistics nerd so that’s a fairly uneducated hypothesis
So there are places in the US where people pronounce ass like arse
Boomer ahh post
broke: asking kids to post less annoyingly
woke: putting up with how kids post because time inevitably marches on
toke: using the internet less
time inevitably marches on
I’m completely fine with my inevitable obsolescence, I just think it’s fucked up that language is changing to be more friendly to advertisers
I just think it’s fucked up that language is changing to be more friendly to advertisers
Isn’t the intent to be less friendly to advertisers? A brand doesn’t want to be associated with suicide. So people say “unalive themself” instead, which carries the same meaning as “suicide”, thus making a mockery of the attempt at censorship
A brand doesn’t want to be associated with suicide.
And this is achieved by implementing lazy automated word filters because actual content moderation would be too much work. The end result is that people internalise the presence of these filters and continue to speak like they’re present even when they’re not on TikTok, etc. It’s just incredibly fucking bleak
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Ah yes the famously filtered “laugh out loud”
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Why would rolling on the floor be filtered
skibidi
skibougeoise
I do not believe that word can be said by mortal tongues
Stupid ahh post
🎶"I’m like a one eyed cat peepin in a seafood store"🎤
Nah, I love any n all subversion of authority. Tho it might alter the language it’s not the kids fault it’s the censors, and if the fallout is just me hittin up urban dictionary now and again ill do it with a gotdamn smile on my wrinkled-ahh face. Get em kids!
I’m not angry at the kids either, I’m more just despairing thinking about the extent to which human social activity has been captured by giant corporate platforms
Slang is cool. Complying in advance and self censoring words that aren’t a big deal isn’t.
All it does is crank up the speed on the euphemism treadmill
In that case I’m in complete agreement with you.
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.
God said that?? oh, fair enough then
