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YEET it out there

New words are always appearing, but most of them disappear before ever making it into a proper dictionary.  Each individual has their own unique overall set of words and pronunciations, known as their "idiolect".  The next step above that is how small groups of people who get together regularly may share a few unique phrases within that group, but when they try to speak to people outside the group, those phrases will fall flat.  With our hyper-connected world, there are so many layers of language, it gets confusing.

I'm regularly surprised that none of the word games we've tried will take NOOB or DERP.  I have been hearing people calling each other noobs for 5-10 years now, or saying "derp" as a sort of "oops", and calling things "derpy."  I suppose this is mostly in the realm of video gaming, but it spilled over into regular conversations a while ago.

An interesting case that's currently developing is YEET.  I first heard it while playing Minecraft with my 10-year-old niece, who at one point was standing a few blocks above me and not saying anything, and weird things were happening in the room.  When I asked what she was doing, she said, "I'm yeeting potions on you."  Comically, when I said that's not a real word, she asked her dad (my little brother) who of course said, "yes, it's a word" because he hears kids using it.  My gut reaction was, "Show me any book with that word printed in it."


Here's a fine hill to YEET things from


But it's a long road from babble to collective babble to some semblance of actual usage, to appearing in print.

The Merriam-Webster dictionary does not list YEET but it has a fascinating blurb about the word.  It says that it has been watching YEET for a while, but it does not yet meet the criteria for inclusion.  The criteria are: widespread usage and consistent usage.  So, the word has to reach some level of general recognizability, and has to be used consistently.  They say the word is converging on a meaning of, roughly, "to throw a thing, specifically not caring about what happens to the thing thrown."

I heard it in a Minecraft video from Wattles last week, where he yeeted some minecarts up a ramp into the distance.  Then my other brother, who has a 10-year-old son, says they use it all the time now.  But even six months ago, was it circulating at all?

Last night, this came up on Facebook, the "yeet version" of various olympic sports:




Anyone can make a meme image like this, and it might have failed to make any sense to anyone, but when a handful of people responded with their own yeet phrases, it looks like it's becoming fairly well established.  I have a strong suspicion that the people most familiar with the word are parents of kids in the same age group as where I first heard it.

So, I figured I should YEET this article out there.  ("Yeet" because I don't care where it lands, I suppose.)  It's a perfect window on the process of word acceptance.



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