Studying linguistics is actually so wonderful because when you explain youth slang to older professors, instead of complaining about how "your generation can't speak right/ you're butchering the language" they light up and go “really? That’s so wonderful! What an innovative construction! Isn't language wonderful?"

I find a lot of the current discussion of appropriative language so interesting because it is predicated on the assumption of attributing all slang as gen z lingo and ignoring how most of the time it is just stealing AAVE. (and whether or not the multi-cultural exchange of language occurs regardless of social structures)

just anecdotally, and for comparison– a lot of the humour I grew up on was mockery of people who tried to appropriate black American culture in an attempt to be cool, it was ironically and unironically using AAVE and while I don't think people cared to understand the social implications of that choice it seemed to me to be a choice of language done with implicit understanding that what made that youth culture slang cool was that it was originated in a black context. I'm not defending this useage, I'm just trying to express my understanding of what was happening. I would watch something on MTV and there would be elevated rapper personas, I would go to school and kids would be imitating that language unironically, I would watch a comedy show and some middle aged comedian would jokingly use the slang poorly because the humor was that they were using it and they were a white brittish man, on another chanel I would get the Ali G show, on the radio they would play pretty fly for a white guy... ironic or not the slang used was pretty much always understood as coming from a specific group of people first.

and obviously there's a lot to say about how slang is taken from one community and recontextualised in another and then brought into mainstream use so divorced from its original context that people start calling it Internet Slang

and I guess I'm just curious when that shift in pop cultural understanding (as I perceive it) happened. I don't just wanna attribute it all to kids-these-days-isim. I think probably the decontextualisesing effect of the web is a part of it. I'm sure comodification of identity has a hand in it too.

all of this to say, I think one of the best curse words I've ever heard is "bombaclaat" and I never use it and rarely ever hear it but i think it's great. sorry about rambling about my confusion on the current conversation about language appropriation