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Comment by dec0dedab0de | Hacker News Reader

I grew up 10 minutes from Philadelphia, and I distinctively remember kids I know starting to say jawn in the mid 90s. I was like wait are you saying joint, as in a spike lee joint? and they were like no it's jawn. Around the same time everyone changed the emphasized word in the phrase "yeah it is" when in agreement. More recently it reminds me how people switched to "all the sudden" all of a sudden.

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I was raised in south jersey, about 30m from Philly, and I remember exactly when jawn hit our little town, right around Y2K. I was in 9th grade at the time, and I remember it being like an arms race where people were throwing jawns out at every little thing, regardless of necessity. I also remember it pissed off a couple of the "cool kids" who were actively trying to coin "gwat" with the other students. It had some legs at first, but jawn came along and everyone forgot gwat.

that's so fetch!

Stop trying to make fetch happen.

that's so moosh of you

Nah, safe.

I was visiting Birmingham when "safe" was taking off in England (2006?) but hadn't reached Scotland yet. Was talking to a random guy in a bar, and I couldn't understand why he was so insistent that Birmingham was "safe"

Safe predates 2006 in the UK by a long distance. “Laters” was a fun one. A shibboleth to pretend you are from London if you live just outside.

Maybe among younger people in the South East of England, but it certainly hadn't spread all the way north at that point

Someone here's going to need to explain "safe" and "laters" to this Yank

"safe" is just some slang meaning like "cool"

"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 :)

Thanks for scratching that itch. Laters definitely sounds contrive. Totally moosh.

Safe, mate!

(or less inauthentic, "nae bother")

Yeah it was definitely try hard IMO. I said some of the old crap sayings but only said “laters” only in pure irony!

OMG that's funny! Thanks for sharing.

Huh, I grew up in Cherry Hill and graduated HS in 2000, guess we missed it because I didn't learn about the term until years later.

Yeah I feel everyone around me who used this word added a bit of a "t" sound to the end. It wasn't until I was an adult I saw it spelled out like "jawn".

Maybe the opposite of jawn is jawn't?

Interestingly a "jaunt" is British English (or maybe just Scots?) for a little walk, like a stroll

> More recently it reminds me how people switched to "all the sudden" all of a sudden.

...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!

I may be wrong but I think rather than 'slang' the correct word would be 'idiom'. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/idiom

"all of a sudden" is probably ubiquitous in english and so whilst it is an idiom, it is a standard idiom!

"all of a sudden" is definitely a standard idiom. In fact:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=%22all%20o...

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