Mocking new-age slang has become impossible (but imma keep doin it, dawg)

It’s getting hard out there for a pimp.

Get it? Cuz that’s not something that an average human would say. If you were ever going to hear that sentence uttered in earnest, it would be by someone with a low level education working as an entrepreneur, probably in an urban area, and definitely in a field that is explicitly illegal or has some aspect of illegality to the business. Not necessarily actual pimping out prostitutes but anything where the “out there” is a wild west obstacle course of dangers and the “pimp” refers to a person in that cowboy position of navigating an uncivilized and frontier mostly unprotected by the law or state representatives and often in opposition to them. So for someone in a context of none-of-that to say that particular phrase – which is also the title of a hip-hop song they likely never heard, or if they have then they’ve definitely only listened to from a lifestyle far removed from the one being sung about – probably while sitting in an ergonomic chair at their laptop, is all mildly funny because it doesn’t match. All humor is rooted in some form or incongruity and a good source of every day little specs of lulz you can pepper into daily speech is to use vernacular that identifiably isn’t part of any that you identify with. It’s also a good well to plunge for lulz cuz its dangerous in that it very thinly borders unintentional cringe as the equation of “this is what the kids are saying so what if *I* said it!???” has more of a chance of failing than it does successfully landing (think – your elderly math teacher saying “whats up dudes?” or my mom in the late 90s saying “I don’t think so homie”). But if done right, such flourishes can garnish a sentence nicely.

The problem is that we have fallen into a dark era for social satire because everyone is a posing pretentious inauthentic weirdo narcissist for real – so pretending to be one as a goof is rendered much harder.

From 1998 to around 2010, I never had anyone confused that I was obviously making fun of the “hip new lingo the kids are using these days” by using words like dawg, gurl, lolz, lulz, homie, yo, bro, sup, aight, imma, floopa, gloopa, and yikka snikka wut wuuut. Some of those might be made up. But the point is that it was obvs what was going on: a farcical commentary on contemporary speech that is stupid.

But now, my stoop leet satire has been rendered ineffective by mainstream adoption of that which I was satirizing.

First they took from me, my lampooning of the narcissist by mainstreaming that caricature into accepted societal standards and now this. People just don’t know that the use of dumb words that other (read: dumb) people use sincerely, is a joke because both verbal appropriation and humorous use of dumb words has been adopted too widely.

It’s wrong, it’s bad for society, and it’s soops lame because if this mainstreaming of my lame bits continues, I will cease to have any identity whatsoever.

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