[Ads-l] yassifying

[Stanton McCandlish]

Encountered here, and published 2024-05-27:

  https://www.thecut.com/article/mom-stop-facetuning-your-kids.html

The original title (judging both from the URL and the <title> element) of
the piece was apparently "Mom, Stop FaceTuning Your Kids" but was later
changed to "Stop Yassifying Your Kids", probably to avoid mentioning a
specific software brand name (and, I guess, to not finger-point at mothers
in particular).

The usage comes from an enthusiastic "Yass!" commonly used in recent-ish
social media (especially beauty- and fashion-related video posts) either as
a self-declaration in the video or its title about one's own fine
appearance, or as approval in third-party comments.

For once, Urban Dictionary is actually behind the times on this, and only
covers a generic "slang way of saying 'yes'" meaning, without having picked
up on the more contextually specific drift of the usage (plus UD has the
unusual nonsense definitions lower down).

  https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Yass

The more general usage still survives; I've seen it at least twice in the
last week in Facebook meme-pic posts that didn't have anything to do with
fashion/beauty, where it was just used as a silly "Internet-speak" way of
saying 'yes'.

UD seems to indicate the more general usage arose on Vine.co (a TikTok
precursor) around 2015. There's some hint that it's intended to imitate
[American] white-girl pronunciation, but I remain skeptical.

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