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Comment by idle_zealot | Hacker News Reader

You're right that it's in-group signaling, but that's actually why it's going to basically disappear within a few years. This sort of youth slang rotates out regularly.

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We still say "cool" roughly 50 years later. Though "swell" is basically gone.

That's because "cool" is cool. "Swell" is only groovy.

Why Every Generation Uses This One Slang Word | Otherwords

https://youtu.be/-YQB2tE6-8U?is=xR2aOq1w5p6cj1XT

We also say about 50 other variations of the word cool depending on the vibes. Cool is basically the low vibe cool.

Which word from this wave won't be unalive in 50 years?

I'm middle aged and I still remember much of my peer groups' slang from the teen years, I might use it with nostalgia with those people when we cross paths, but I guess this generation has more of the internet to centralize the slang. My group was already chronically on the internet but that was pretty nerdy back then and so were we. My recollection is that the women coined most of the slang.

A lot of it has to do with religious fundamentalism too, though. There are religious groups whose members believe they are participating in sin if they read words describing that sin.

Alas, this is not an easy problem to just hand wave away as youth slang. There will always be an older person policing youth speech. That is the nature of religion, governments and social policy as a whole - to ensure the youthful generations don't upset the bucket in which the old sit.

For as long as the Internet has been online there have been curmudgeons willfully applying their personal doctrine to strangers.

Say what? How can they know what the sins are, unless someone tells them? And how are they going to tell them without using words that describe the sin?

I mean, look, I can say that sex outside of marriage is a sin without a pornographic description. But I can't say it without "sex", or a euphemism for sex.

In practice, how can they make that work?

I'm not trying to rationalize this, but have you really never encountered someone who is inconsolable when they hear someone cuss?

The reason a lot of social network sites censor swear words and other words describing violence, is because they get inundated with complaints from fundamentalists who get offended by language, as if there is some spell being cast on them from afar.

And what I mean to say is, this is the motivation behind the censorship - because fruitcake butterflies think language is going to hurt them.

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