TALK OF THE ’10s
Every age has its slanguage. In the groovy 1960s, some people were trendsetters, which was A-OK. Others had hang-ups, which was pretty heavy, and The Man was a downer. The 1980s were righteous and totally tubular, and in the 1990s, anyone who didn’t like their McJob had to take a chill pill—otherwise they could end up going postal. Get the idea? The 2010s were no exception. The decade had its own share of unique words and phrases. But because of the instant nature of 21st-century internet culture, a lot of them became overused almost as soon as they appeared, generating intense criticism and ending up on year-end “Most Annoying” lists (which didn’t seem to hurt their popularity). Here are some of our favorite words of the ’10s, and how we got them.
SELFIE
Meaning: A self-portrait taken of one or more people on a digital camera
Story: Here are two important photography milestones:
1.In 1839 Robert Cornelius produced a daguerreotype image of himself, which was the first known photographic self-portrait ever taken.
2.In 2002 Nathan Hope posted a blurry close-up photo of his cut lip, followed by this description: “Um, drunk at a mates 21st, I tripped ofer and landed lip first (with front teeth coming a very close second) on a set of steps. I had a hole about 1cm long right through my bottom lip. And sorry about the focus, it was a selfie.”
That’s the first known appearance of the word “selfie.” Hope later said that he didn’t coin it; it was common slang at the time in his home country. Based on the word structure of “selfie,” can you guess which country? That’s right—selfie is Australian for “self-portrait.” A common “slanguage” practice Down Under is to take the first syllable of a word and add an “ie” ending—as in barbie (barbecue), firie (firefighter), and Aussie (Australian).
The word caught on internationally a few years later when the first front-facing camera phones hit the market, ushering in the age of the selfie. It was the Oxford English Dictionary’s 2013 Word of the Year (and in 2015, the term “selfie stick” was added to the dictionary).
Backlash: Both the word (and the practice) have been blamed for everything from enabling a culture of narcissists to ruining photography, but the fad, which hit its peak in the 2010s thanks to a billion or so social network users on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, is proving to be critic-proof. As far back as 2014, Google was estimating that 93 million selfies were taken every day. “What [George] Orwell failed to predict,” noted comedian Keith Lowell Jensen, “is that we’d buy the cameras ourselves, and that our biggest fear would be that nobody was watching.”
World’s first “unwillingly independent” nation: Singapore, tossed out of Malaysia in 1965.
Meaning: When a man attempts to explain something to a woman in a patronizing manner, assuming she doesn’t know as much as he does
Story: This portmanteau of “man” and “explain” was borne out of a 2008 essay called “Men Explain Things to Me: Facts Didn’t Get in Their Way” by Rebecca Solnit. She tells a story about an older, distinguished man at a party who’d heard she was an author, and asked, “So, what are your books about?” When Solnit mentioned that one of them was about influential English photographer Eadweard Muybridge, the man interrupted and asked her if she’d read the “very important book” about Muybridge that had been published that year. Solnit’s friend tried to tell the man that he was actually talking about Solnit’s book, “but,” she writes, “he just continued on his way. She had to say that it was her book three or four times before he finally took it in. And then, as if in a 19th-century novel, he went ashen. That I was indeed the author of the very important book it turned out he hadn’t read, just read about in the New York Times Book Review a few months earlier, so confused the neat categories into which his world was sorted that he was stunned speechless—for a moment, before he began holding forth again. Being women, we were politely out of earshot before we started laughing.”
Solnit didn’t actually use the word “mansplain” in her story; it first appeared about a month later in a comment thread under a repost of the essay, where other women shared their own mansplaining tales. Then it became a trending hashtag on Twitter, and two years later in 2010, “mansplain” was the New York Times Word of the Year.
Backlash: Even though Solnit didn’t coin the verb, she often gets the credit for it. And at first, she tried to distance herself from mansplain “because it seems a little bit more condemnatory of the male of the species than I ever wanted it to be.” In fact, that was the main beef people had against the word—that it pigeonholed men in the same manner that they were accused of pigeonholing women. But then, Solnit recalled, “A PhD candidate [a young woman] said to me, ‘No, you need to look at how much we needed this word, how this word let us describe an experience every woman has but we didn’t have language for.’ ” So now Solnit is proud of it. (At the BRI, we call it “Unclejohnsplain”…and he does it to everybody.)
SAFE SPACE
Meaning: A place—either real of figurative—where one can go to escape from a hostile or traumatic environment
Story: The roots of this term can be traced to Los Angeles in the 1960s, where a “safe space” was any place LGBTQ people could go to avoid being harassed or arrested for being gay (which was considered a crime). From there, it was adopted by the Women’s Liberation Movement of the 1970s and ’80s to describe, not so much a physical place, but a community where women felt they could safely speak about their experiences.
According to Guinness World Records, the most difficult tongue twister is “The sixth sick sheik’s sixth sheep’s sick.”
Backlash: The actual “safe spaces” that have spurned such heated debates first showed up on U.S. college campuses in the early 2000s as places for students (usually female) to go if they felt threatened. The Telegraph noted in 2015 that the word has been co-opted: “The notion of the ‘safe space’ first emerged to describe a place of refuge for people exposed to racial prejudice or sexism. But the phrase has changed meaning to the point where now it often implies protection from ‘exposure to ideas that make one uncomfortable,’ according to Nadine Strossen, a prominent law professor and former head of the American Civil Liberties Union.” That echoes a common sentiment—mostly among conservatives—that colleges are becoming too “politically correct” and a threat to free speech.
BAE
Meaning: An affectionate nickname for a significant other
Story: “Bae” was added to the Oxford Dictionary in 2015—a year after the Pharrell Williams/Miley Cyrus duet “Come Get It Bae” hit #23 on the Billboard Hot 100. But when it comes to tracking the word’s origins, etymologists are stumped. The most commonly cited origin—that it’s an acronym for “before anyone else”—is false. It’s also not a shortened version of Beyoncé, a popular assumption that came about due to the simultaneous ascensions of the word and the pop star. Katherine Connor Martin, head of Oxford’s U.S. dictionary, explained to Esquire why finding the origin of slang words can be tough to do, even in the internet age: “Slang is often very transient, first appearing in subcultures, and then tends to be proliferated online. It’s usually difficult to predict which words will break through.” The earliest verifiable appearance of “bae” is from 2003, when an internet user named “Trong” submitted the word to The Urban Dictionary, defining it as “bastardization of the term ‘babe’.”
Backlash: “Bae” is one of those words you can put into two distinct categories: people who use it unabashedly, and people who hate it. The most common criticism of “bae,” as the Independent UK pointed out in 2015 after naming it “one of the most annoying words in the world right now,” is that it’s a pointless abbreviation, writing, “Yeah, cos ‘babe’ takes way too long to say. Yuck.” Echoing that sentiment, the definition of “bae” as “significant other” has been demoted to only the second entry of the word in The Urban Dictionary. That’s based on the number of “upvotes” it has amassed (about 800). The number-one definition, which has amassed nearly 70,000 upvotes, is “a Danish word for poop.”
For more of the decade’s most controversial words and phrases, twerk your way on over to page 205.
Longest regularly scheduled commercial flight: Singapore to New York (19 hours).