The International House of Pancakes set itself apart among chain restaurants this September when it tweeted, “Pancakes. Errybody got time fo’ dat.” But the American starch dispensary—whose claims to internationality include a middling presence in Canada, four stores in the Middle East, and a menu disconcertingly inclusive of burritos, spaghetti, and the word French—failed to distinguish itself the next month with its tweet “Pancakes bae <3.”
At that point, the term bae had already been used by the official social-media accounts of Olive Garden, Jamba Juice, Pizza Hut, Whole Foods, Mountain Dew, AT&T, Wal-Mart, Burger King and, not surprisingly, the notoriously idiosyncratic Internet personas of Arby’s and Denny’s. Each time, the word was delivered with magnificently forceful offhandedness, the calculated ease of the doll that comes to life and tries to pass herself off as a real girl but fails to fully conceal the hinges in her knees. (“What hinges? Oh, these?”)
This bae trendspotting is courtesy of a newly minted Twitter account calledBrands Saying Bae, which tweeted its first on December 27. Yesterday morning it had 7,000 followers, and by evening it had doubled to 14,000. That is the sort of audience engagement and growth that corporate accounts almost never see, despite their best attempts at hipness through dubious cultural appropriation. Brands Saying Bae is reminding people, rather, that advertising—of which social-media accounts for businesses are a part—seeks out that authenticity, twists it out of shape, and turns culture against people. Our brains are cannily adapted to sense inauthenticity and come to hate what is force-fed. So it is with a heavy heart that we mourn this year the loss of bae, inevitable as it was.
Bae was generally adored as a word in 2014, even finding itself among the runners-up for the Oxford Dictionaries’ Word of the Year. (Along with normcore and slacktivism, though all would eventually suffer a disappointing loss at the hands of the uninspired vape.) Oxford’s blog loosely defined bae as a “term of endearment for one’s romantic partner” common among teenagers, with “origins in African-American English,” perpetuated widely on social media and in music, particularly hip-hop and R&B. The lyrical database Rap Genius actually tracesbae back as far as 2005. But after nearly a decade of subcultural percolation, 2014 was the year that bae went fully mainstream. (...)
In the case of bae, Urban Dictionary entries date back years and have been very widely read. One user on the site defined it as “baby, boo, sweetie” in December of 2008, pegging its usage to Western Florida. Even before that, in August of 2006, a user defined it as “a lover or significant other”—though in the ensuing years that definition has garnered equal shares of up-votes and down-votes, with an impressive 11,000 of each. It’s impossible to parse how many of those readers disagree with the particulars of the definition, and how many are simply expressing distaste for the word.
Video blogger William Haynes, who would be among the down-votes, made an adamant case in his popular YouTube series in August that “unknown to the general populace, bae is actually an acronym.” So it would technically be BAE. And according to Haynes, it means Before Anyone Else. That theory has mild support on Urban Dictionary, though it first appeared long after the initial definitions.
Katy Steinmetz in Time aptly mentioned another, more likely origin story earlier this year—one that also accounts for the uncommon a-e pairing—that bae is simply a shortened version of babe (or baby, or beau). “Slangsters do love to embrace the dropped-letter versions of words,” she wrote, noting that in some circles cool has become coo, crazy cray, et cetera. (...)
Now the ordinary people on the Internet appropriating bae are the people who run the social-media accounts for commercial brands. That all of this might be affecting linguistic patterns in a broader way is interesting. The commercial appropriation of a word signals the end of its hipness in any case, but as Kwame Opam at The Verge called it, “appropriation of urban youth culture” can banish a term to a particularly bleached sphere of irrelevance.
The most egregious usage involves the lack of any joke, or even logic. In August, Pizza Hut tweeted “Bacon Stuffed Crust. Bae-con Stuffed Crust.” What the Brands Saying Bae twitter has highlighted is the absurdity of that gimmick, which is the same as is employed in a sitcom where an elderly woman says something sexual, and then, cue the laugh track. The humor is ostensibly to come from the juxtaposition of the source and the nature of the diction. Brands aren’t supposed to talk like that. Whaaaat? It’s the same tired device that killed OMG and basic. (IHOP also tweeted, in June, “Pancakes or you’re basic.”) Laughing. Out. Loud.
At that point, the term bae had already been used by the official social-media accounts of Olive Garden, Jamba Juice, Pizza Hut, Whole Foods, Mountain Dew, AT&T, Wal-Mart, Burger King and, not surprisingly, the notoriously idiosyncratic Internet personas of Arby’s and Denny’s. Each time, the word was delivered with magnificently forceful offhandedness, the calculated ease of the doll that comes to life and tries to pass herself off as a real girl but fails to fully conceal the hinges in her knees. (“What hinges? Oh, these?”)This bae trendspotting is courtesy of a newly minted Twitter account calledBrands Saying Bae, which tweeted its first on December 27. Yesterday morning it had 7,000 followers, and by evening it had doubled to 14,000. That is the sort of audience engagement and growth that corporate accounts almost never see, despite their best attempts at hipness through dubious cultural appropriation. Brands Saying Bae is reminding people, rather, that advertising—of which social-media accounts for businesses are a part—seeks out that authenticity, twists it out of shape, and turns culture against people. Our brains are cannily adapted to sense inauthenticity and come to hate what is force-fed. So it is with a heavy heart that we mourn this year the loss of bae, inevitable as it was.
Bae was generally adored as a word in 2014, even finding itself among the runners-up for the Oxford Dictionaries’ Word of the Year. (Along with normcore and slacktivism, though all would eventually suffer a disappointing loss at the hands of the uninspired vape.) Oxford’s blog loosely defined bae as a “term of endearment for one’s romantic partner” common among teenagers, with “origins in African-American English,” perpetuated widely on social media and in music, particularly hip-hop and R&B. The lyrical database Rap Genius actually tracesbae back as far as 2005. But after nearly a decade of subcultural percolation, 2014 was the year that bae went fully mainstream. (...)
In the case of bae, Urban Dictionary entries date back years and have been very widely read. One user on the site defined it as “baby, boo, sweetie” in December of 2008, pegging its usage to Western Florida. Even before that, in August of 2006, a user defined it as “a lover or significant other”—though in the ensuing years that definition has garnered equal shares of up-votes and down-votes, with an impressive 11,000 of each. It’s impossible to parse how many of those readers disagree with the particulars of the definition, and how many are simply expressing distaste for the word.
Video blogger William Haynes, who would be among the down-votes, made an adamant case in his popular YouTube series in August that “unknown to the general populace, bae is actually an acronym.” So it would technically be BAE. And according to Haynes, it means Before Anyone Else. That theory has mild support on Urban Dictionary, though it first appeared long after the initial definitions.
Katy Steinmetz in Time aptly mentioned another, more likely origin story earlier this year—one that also accounts for the uncommon a-e pairing—that bae is simply a shortened version of babe (or baby, or beau). “Slangsters do love to embrace the dropped-letter versions of words,” she wrote, noting that in some circles cool has become coo, crazy cray, et cetera. (...)
Now the ordinary people on the Internet appropriating bae are the people who run the social-media accounts for commercial brands. That all of this might be affecting linguistic patterns in a broader way is interesting. The commercial appropriation of a word signals the end of its hipness in any case, but as Kwame Opam at The Verge called it, “appropriation of urban youth culture” can banish a term to a particularly bleached sphere of irrelevance.
The most egregious usage involves the lack of any joke, or even logic. In August, Pizza Hut tweeted “Bacon Stuffed Crust. Bae-con Stuffed Crust.” What the Brands Saying Bae twitter has highlighted is the absurdity of that gimmick, which is the same as is employed in a sitcom where an elderly woman says something sexual, and then, cue the laugh track. The humor is ostensibly to come from the juxtaposition of the source and the nature of the diction. Brands aren’t supposed to talk like that. Whaaaat? It’s the same tired device that killed OMG and basic. (IHOP also tweeted, in June, “Pancakes or you’re basic.”) Laughing. Out. Loud.
by James Hamblin, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Paul Michael Hughes/Shutterstock
