[Ads-l] yassifying

[Ben Zimmer]

"Yassify" was the winner of the Informal Word of the Year category at the
2021 ADS WOTY proceedings. It was covered along with other WOTY nominees in
the Aug. 2022 installment of "Among the New Words" in American Speech 97.3.

https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-10096035

The online supplementary materials include citations for "yassify" and
"yassification" going back to Aug. 2020 (with a bracketed cite for "yaaass”
from 2015).

2020 Aug. 26, @puppyoveralls, Twitter: I’m choking on the yassification gas
2020 Aug. 27, @lunarbuizl, Twitter: reply with your favorite [K-pop star]
yeri pictures i want to yassify a few of them

--bgz

On Tue, May 28, 2024 at 1:05 AM Stanton McCandlish <smccandlish at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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.
>
>
>

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org