#my homophobic teacher is going to unalive me

[ars0nr4t]

how could not make my schoolwork gay? 😈

[vaspider]

Language evolves and changes and grows. People use things sarcastically or to mark themselves as part of a group. I type out "folx" not because I don't think "folks" is already gender-neutral but - in part - because it separates me from my homophobic father's use of folks and immediately marks me out as a Publicly Homosexual and Transsexual Person.

Maybe it's just because I'm getting old, and this is like the ... tenth or eleventh iteration of "the children are ruining language!" that I've seen, minimum, but like, two things are true:

The English language is far sturdier than any of this pearl-clutching would have you believe and

You know what they mean, so this language they're using? It's successful. You may be annoyed by it, but it has communicated, which is all language needs to do.

Besides, "unalive" is like 200+ years old. TikTok kids just did a little convergent linguistic evolution.

Like, really. For one, it's fine. For two, unalive is actually an old word. For three, it's fucking fine, actually. For four, it's a demonstration of linguistic hardiness. For five, this sounds to me like when my dad would respond, "HAY IS FOR HORSES AND I'M A PERSON, SAY HELLO," 35 years ago, or castigate me over my "overuse" of "like" (you know, the way you just read past at the beginning of this paragraph and didn't think anything of at all), or the way teachers would make me bend my sentences into unnatural-sounding messes so they didn't end with a preposition. For six? It's fucking fine.

Adults have always complained about kids destroying language, and kids have always changed language so they can communicate about the things that matter to them and so they can mark themselves as part of an in-group and different from their parents. You can complain about the train as it runs you over or you can get on it but the train is going with or without you. You can't stop it, and honestly, nothing makes teenagers want to do shit more than when adults bitch about it, so, like, have at, I guess? Idk.

“you don’t like the proliferation of terms like Unalive outside of TikTok because you realize that you’re aging out of youth culture and it makes you uncomfortable!”

no I don’t like it because there’s something INCREDIBLY dystopian about being forced to soften terms for basic parts of the human experience like death and sex (and even more so terms for oppressed minorities- call me a “le-dollar sign-bian” and I will bite you) purely because advertisers and corporations demand it