[Ads-l] "wyte" as perjorative spelling for "white"

Horatius 00000e76b69c74bf-dmarc-request at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Tue Feb 9 10:13:18 UTC 2021


It's very probable that this spelling is simply used to avoid censorship by social medias.

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-------- Oorspronkelijk bericht --------
Aan 9 feb. 2021 14:56, Ann Burlingham schreef:

> On Mon, Feb 8, 2021 at 6:08 AM Stanton McCandlish <smccandlish at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
>> -----------------------
>> Sender: American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>> Poster: Stanton McCandlish <smccandlish at GMAIL.COM>
>> Subject: Re: "wyte" as perjorative spelling for "white"
>>
>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> WELL, all that drama aside, I for one am curious when this arrived and
>> whether it's just another "weird Internet spelling" silliness like "teh
>> interwebs"; or if it's a hip-hop culture word-play with a unique meaning,
>> like "thicc" and "phat" and "def"; or if it's actually a leftist-discourse
>> neologistic usage like "woke" and "karen"; or more narrowly a BLM-specific
>> usage with or without a narrow implication; or some mixture of these. It
>> goes back to at least early 2018 in the general sense reported here. The
>> *y* in it faintly reminds me of "womyn" and some other left-wing jargon,
>> but that could easily just be blind coincidence. I'm skeptical of the OP's
>> idea that it has to do with avoiding positive cultural associations of the
>> word "white", or it would likely coincide with a spelling shift of "Black"
>> in the same material as well ("Blak"? "Blacc?") which isn't in evidence.
>>
>>
> In my experience I see it in writing by Black women in order to try to
> avoid Facebook or Twitter jail, as they find their posts about white people
> get tagged as "racist".
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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