The enduring mystery of ‘Jawn,’ Philadelphia’s all-purpose noun (2016)
atlasobscura.com
atlasobscura.com
It's a word that has endured surprisingly well, as slang goes. And it's a conspicuously egalitarian term. You'll find it used in both blue-collar and white-collar settings, and across racial lines. There's very little tribal attachment. Nobody cares if you appropriate it. The general sentiment is the more jawn users, the better.
But unfortunately, I'm afraid it may have jumped the shark when the "Jawn Morgan" billboards started appearing:
https://billypenn.com/2022/05/25/jawn-morgan-billboards-phil...
You certainly get plenty of mileage out of the word cringe. Is it a verb, is it an adjective - who knows? Your also ... also construct riffs on "either ... or", "both ... and" and the like. There must be a name for terms like that - you get them in Latin too so they've been around for a while eg nec ... necque (neither ... nor).
Jawn is just a colloquialism but I've seen also ... also several times before now. I've also seen very cringe too.
I am not taking the piss but I feel that I am watching language evolve right in front of me. I suspect that whilst this article and set of threads gets itself all whizzed up over jawn, it is missing the rather bigger point about language and conversations that travel at the speed of light instead of just sound and is distributed by the internet and not just the post office.
On HN we pontificators have an audience that a Roman Imperator could only dream of.
Same thing happens with "y'all", even though it's nowhere close to being as esoteric/regional. A couple years ago, Twitter seemed to have become obsessed with incorporating it conspicuously into every other tweet. I didn't even know "y'all" had rules until that happened. (I couldn't really tell you what those rules are, but it was popping up in places that were so syntactically awkward, by people who were clearly not "y'all" natives. So they definitely exist.)
I'm also a fan of habitual be because it's something that can be expressed in English, but it sounds verbose or relies on context whereas "I be" is self explanatory without any context -you know that the speakers means "I regularly do/feel ___ "
My favorite phrase puts them together: "ya'll be trippin" is IMO the most efficient way in the English language to tell a group of people that their behavior is unacceptable.
Ultimately, since "yous" never fits in the same grammatical slot as "use" (different part of speech), there's never any real chance at confusion anyway. Therefore I weigh in on the side of "yous".
Once again New York has it right and the rest of yous be trippin.
I was the latter circa 2012 but ~8 years in Boston tempered my use, haha.
Yinz [0] has a special place in my heart, because I was born and raised in western PA, but yinzers [1] sometimes leaving me feeling the same way.
It seems like the first tweet from your linked article is suggesting otherwise.
I introduce you to "kwan" (or "kuan") from Visayan, which serves the same purpose.
https://www.reddit.com/r/DoesNotTranslate/comments/jmkvbd/fi...
Kwan is not just a time-filler word like "um." You can legit use it in a sentence as an object-filler word and people still understand.
"I was surfing at the kwan and ate some kwan with hot sauce." "Was it good?" "Oh yeah!"
I kind of think that there must be a vast amount of Filipino culture I don't know about. Big population, but little penetration of the culture in mainland USA.
Absolutely loved getting the chance to participate in it here and there. I miss speaking to native speakers.
The distinction of verbs and nouns in Austronesian languages generally are pretty lax.
Also cool, Tongan and Samoan speakers found Visayan numbering mutually distinguishable -- "lima" for 5, for example.
> "[E]asy conversion of nouns to verbs has been part of English grammar for centuries; it is one of the processes that make English English."
https://www.thoughtco.com/verbing-definition-1692587
Just like "jawn" is not unique (not even within English), in my experience there's almost nothing really unique in any language.
https://spanish.stackexchange.com/a/4839
The "w" sound keeps repeating in the themes here, interesting.
I'm not sure if the etymology is that an egg ("huevo") looks like a zero, so a dumb person or a loser is a "huevo" (an egg, meaning a zero) or "huevón" (huge zero), or if it has to do with testicles (because in Spanish it's common to call them eggs), so a "huevón" might someone who's "as dumb as a giant testicle". "Boludo" and "pelotudo" are more like the latter, for sure, though they could still derived from zero looking like a ball.
> The "w" sound keeps repeating in the themes here, interesting.
In weón it's really just a slight change from huevón, and mostly just dropping the 'v'.
"i-kwan mo yung kwan" -> "just thing the thing"
...and as a non-native english speaker, I just learned that "all of a sudden" is slang and not just a normal part of the language.
Wow!
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=%22all%20o...
"laters" would just be a short way of saying "see you later" - but it sounds really a bit lame and try-hard to me, or the kind of thing a middle-aged, middle-class person would write as dialogue for a working class urban teenage character in a TV show. I think quickthrower2 is saying the same thing but maybe they can correct me (sounds like they're England, so they'll know better than me).
Don't worry about either, you won't hear them particularly often :)
(or less inauthentic, "nae bother")
The Enduring Mystery of ‘Jawn,’ Philadelphia’s All-Purpose Noun (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20574296 - July 2019 (108 comments)
The Enduring Mystery of 'Jawn', Philadelphia's All-Purpose Noun - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11367406 - March 2016 (52 comments)
"Dude can be anything. Males are dude. Females are dude. My phone is dude. That cat over there, it is dude. The green light that only lasts long enough for 1 car to pass is dude. I have called my hair "dude". I have called my coffee maker "dude". The entire population of the world, and all of their belongings, are all dude." - Some post on Reddit
> Come on dude, why are you so slow
> My old dude lasted me 6 years
> I love this dude
But I wouldn't say any of these things:
> I lost my dude earlier, can you call it?
> I spent $600 on this dude
> Don't you have your dude on you?
I'm a Brit, reflecting on the American dialect I've picked up, so I very much could be wrong. I'd be intrigued to know if you really do use "dude" like that.
Yes to this one. It's gotta be clear from context.
This one sounds alright, to my ESL ears.
The rule it seems to me is you have to be pointing at the thing or making a clear reference to it. This dude right here is okay, some dude you own, while talking about some offscreen object, much weirder.
But its influence seems to be completely stopped at DC, where people from Philly "who made it" but not in NYC try to show they aren't from Philly.
I lived there through college, and never felt any influence to pick up the slang since it seemed to just exist in a bubble that was ridiculed from all sides. I would say I wanted a hoagie at the store, because they would pretend they didn't know what a sub was, but thats about it.
But jawn seems like the most boring word that online articles like to talk about. Its obviously prevalent but its also not unknown and actually fairly common. When I was in Philly earlier this year a lawyer's ad on the radio used it prevalently to try and show some kind of connection to the city. Its kind of unique but uninteresting, similar to a broccoli rabe sandwich bloggers rave about since the best cheesesteaks in the city have basically been established for decades now.
Now an article explaining 'actin jo (joe??)' I'd love to read about because I've never gotten a straight answer on that, but have seen fights get started because one girl said it to another.
E.g. "can you grab the shit from my truck" vs "can you grab the jawn"
You really need to know the difference if trying to speak Spanish: https://www.spanish.academy/blog/a-simple-guide-to-demonstra...
Edit: a_mechanic got here first: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32872443
[1] https://southpark.cc.com/clips/151539/welcome-to-marklar
For example this is a valid sentence:
“Person 1: I was at the jawn down the street when that bad jawn from up the block walked in. But she didn’t say anything.
Person 2: oh that’s a bad jawn”
Translation:
“Person 1: I was at the place down the street when that pretty woman from up the block walked in. But she didn’t say anything.
Person 2: oh that sucks”
"“Person 1: I was at the whatever down the street when that bad whatever from up the block walked in. But she didn’t say anything.
Person 2: oh that’s a bad whatever”
?
Uh, "smurf" is like that too.
I live outside Philly, and yes, they use jawn.
'const' is more a qualifier or an adjective than an object/thing. You wouldn't s/fast/jawn/ in the sentence "a fast car", like you can't replace const in "a const iterator"