![]() Before long, research shows, men tend to catch on. That women have started the trend is unsurprising, as women usually introduce new constructions into a language. Or have you noticed that, to convey emphasis or surprise, many young women have begun appending an uh to their sentences? “No-uh!” “Move-uh!” “It’s for you-uh!” Most adults would recognize this as a habit small children typically outgrow by middle school, but women have begun retaining it in adulthood-one can catch it everywhere from the speaking style of the comedian Aubrey Plaza to the local Chipotle. In many ways, it channels the stubbornness of the little boy who asserts nothing more than “Because!” when he’s asked why he scribbled on the wallpaper with a Sharpie. ![]() It helps its speaker hide behind the authority of the x-and avoid all the messiness of actual argument. The rhetorical appeal is easy to see: Stripped of its of, because transforms from a way of elucidating one’s case to a puckish refusal to do so. Even 10 years ago, such constructions would have sounded like a clear grammatical error from someone still learning to speak English today, they have become so widespread that the American Dialect Society crowned because 2013’s Word of the Year. Take our newfangled use of the word because, as seen in sentences such as I believe in climate change because science and You’re reading this article because procrastination. It’s a new way of sounding “real,” with a prominence that would challenge a time traveler from as recently as the year 2000.Įxamples of kidspeak are everywhere, once you start to look. Young kids tend to simplify language, leaving out verbs (“Daddy home!” a toddler might say as her father walks in) or using words in incorrect but intelligible ways-plurals like feets and deskses are common my daughter, at age 3, described herself as “a talky kind of a person.” The adoption of some of these linguistic tics by adults-in the form of pilly and many other terms-has given rise to a register we might call kidspeak. More and more, adults are sprinkling their speech with the language of children. ![]() Pilly and its counterparts are not just charming, one-off neologisms they’re signs of a broader shift in how Americans nowadays are given to putting things. On the sleeper-hit sitcom Schitt’s Creek, for instance, one of the protagonists, David, speaks of a game night getting “yelly,” while his sister describes a love interest as “homelessy.” Meanwhile, back in real life, one of my podcast listeners informed me of a Washington, D.C., gentrifier who declared that a neighborhood was no longer as “shooty-stabby” as it once had been. My writer-acquaintance, I recognized, was not alone in bending language this way. The word had a wonderfully childish sound to it, the tacked-on y creating a new adjective in the style of happy, angry, and silly. I recently had the honor of meeting an award-winning literary sort, a man wry and restrained and overall quite utterly mature, who casually referred to having gone through a phase in his 20s when he’d been “pilly”-that is, when he’d taken a lot of recreational drugs. ![]()
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