From your reference it can also be used as a verb, which is dope.
I kind of think that there must be a vast amount of Filipino culture I don't know about. Big population, but little penetration of the culture in mainland USA.
Thingy, whatsit, whatchermacallit - there are loads of these words. “Jawn” may have slight differences in the way that it is used when compared with “whatsit”, but it doesn’t seem very different. “Dongle” used to be used this way (by the person who invented the copy-protection dongle, who then repurposed the word). And then there’a the old faithful Latin “re”.
Yes, the word came to be used as an euphemism because of its genericity, not the other way around. If the context doesn't suggest otherwise it is not considered impolite.
That comes from "huevón", which is... really hard to explain in English. The Argentine "boludo" and "pelotudo" are in the same vein, and mean roughly the same non-sensical thing.
I'm not sure if the etymology is that an egg ("huevo") looks like a zero, so a dumb person or a loser is a "huevo" (an egg, meaning a zero) or "huevón" (huge zero), or if it has to do with testicles (because in Spanish it's common to call them eggs), so a "huevón" might someone who's "as dumb as a giant testicle". "Boludo" and "pelotudo" are more like the latter, for sure, though they could still derived from zero looking like a ball.
> The "w" sound keeps repeating in the themes here, interesting.
In weón it's really just a slight change from huevón, and mostly just dropping the 'v'.
Uncountable, e.g. "look at all this shit in my truck". I cannot count all the shit. For countable plural I will use the form "shits", e.g. "these two shits left their bikes on my lawn".
I grew up 10 minutes from Philadelphia, and I distinctively remember kids I know starting to say jawn in the mid 90s. I was like wait are you saying joint, as in a spike lee joint? and they were like no it's jawn. Around the same time everyone changed the emphasized word in the phrase "yeah it is" when in agreement. More recently it reminds me how people switched to "all the sudden" all of a sudden.
Yeah I feel everyone around me who used this word added a bit of a "t" sound to the end. It wasn't until I was an adult I saw it spelled out like "jawn".
I was raised in south jersey, about 30m from Philly, and I remember exactly when jawn hit our little town, right around Y2K. I was in 9th grade at the time, and I remember it being like an arms race where people were throwing jawns out at every little thing, regardless of necessity. I also remember it pissed off a couple of the "cool kids" who were actively trying to coin "gwat" with the other students. It had some legs at first, but jawn came along and everyone forgot gwat.
I was visiting Birmingham when "safe" was taking off in England (2006?) but hadn't reached Scotland yet. Was talking to a random guy in a bar, and I couldn't understand why he was so insistent that Birmingham was "safe"
"laters" would just be a short way of saying "see you later" - but it sounds really a bit lame and try-hard to me, or the kind of thing a middle-aged, middle-class person would write as dialogue for a working class urban teenage character in a TV show. I think quickthrower2 is saying the same thing but maybe they can correct me (sounds like they're England, so they'll know better than me).
Don't worry about either, you won't hear them particularly often :)
Jawn is useful for readability, but also provides an easy performance benefit too. Iterators for `std::unordered_map` will have the proper `const` values and the compiler won’t need to do any implicit conversions.
Trying to demonstrate that you can't replace literally any word with it?
'const' is more a qualifier or an adjective than an object/thing. You wouldn't s/fast/jawn/ in the sentence "a fast car", like you can't replace const in "a const iterator"
I've been using variations of "jawn" or "jawns" as my username for 20+ years.
It's a word that has endured surprisingly well, as slang goes. And it's a conspicuously egalitarian term. You'll find it used in both blue-collar and white-collar settings, and across racial lines. There's very little tribal attachment. Nobody cares if you appropriate it. The general sentiment is the more jawn users, the better.
But unfortunately, I'm afraid it may have jumped the shark when the "Jawn Morgan" billboards started appearing:
ehhhh I disagree. I definitely cringe when I hear a hipster who's lived here for 2 years try to inject jawn into every conversation. Feels very forced. Also Jawn being put on pins and shirts is also very cringe to me
Yeah. I feel like there's two types of people that actually use jawn: those that are very Philly and those that are trying, really, really hard to sound Philly. I can't say I've said jawn with a straight face since I was a little kid.
"I definitely cringe" and "Also ... is also ... very cringe to me"
You certainly get plenty of mileage out of the word cringe. Is it a verb, is it an adjective - who knows? Your also ... also construct riffs on "either ... or", "both ... and" and the like. There must be a name for terms like that - you get them in Latin too so they've been around for a while eg nec ... necque (neither ... nor).
Jawn is just a colloquialism but I've seen also ... also several times before now. I've also seen very cringe too.
I am not taking the piss but I feel that I am watching language evolve right in front of me. I suspect that whilst this article and set of threads gets itself all whizzed up over jawn, it is missing the rather bigger point about language and conversations that travel at the speed of light instead of just sound and is distributed by the internet and not just the post office.
On HN we pontificators have an audience that a Roman Imperator could only dream of.
you'd have to be blind and deaf not to notice that gradual downhill slide of popular vocabulary. It may have been said with a bit more grace, but they're not wrong either.
"Gee, 20% of this paragraph is the same word, perhaps it would serve me well to mix it up."
> when I hear a hipster who's lived here for 2 years try to inject jawn into every conversation. Feels very forced.
Same thing happens with "y'all", even though it's nowhere close to being as esoteric/regional. A couple years ago, Twitter seemed to have become obsessed with incorporating it conspicuously into every other tweet. I didn't even know "y'all" had rules until that happened. (I couldn't really tell you what those rules are, but it was popping up in places that were so syntactically awkward, by people who were clearly not "y'all" natives. So they definitely exist.)
Sentences that end with a y’all still come across as distinctly Southern. Sentences that begin with y’all, on the other hand, sound normal or dare I say even hip. To me that is.
I love ya'll because second person plural is something that English annoying lacks.
I'm also a fan of habitual be because it's something that can be expressed in English, but it sounds verbose or relies on context whereas "I be" is self explanatory without any context -you know that the speakers means "I regularly do/feel ___ "
My favorite phrase puts them together: "ya'll be trippin" is IMO the most efficient way in the English language to tell a group of people that their behavior is unacceptable.
On the one hand "yous" fills this void in a way that is more consistent with the rules of pluralizing words, but on the other hand it also introduces a homophone with "use" which could hypothetically lead to confusion. So which is worse, inconsistency (y'all) or ambiguity (yous)?
Ultimately, since "yous" never fits in the same grammatical slot as "use" (different part of speech), there's never any real chance at confusion anyway. Therefore I weigh in on the side of "yous".
Once again New York has it right and the rest of yous be trippin.
For Boston/Mass it's "wicked." You can tell when someone injects it naturally and they grew up with its various contexts, or you're a new transplant and it's usually used in every other sentence.
I was the latter circa 2012 but ~8 years in Boston tempered my use, haha.
Same although haven't been there for many years and still I never heard lawn once from my parents, my relatives or myself. Is there a more localized area of Philly that uses it - my family covers south and west Philly.
I don’t think so. When I read that I don’t substitute the proper words in my head as I would with jawn. Also, “whatever” sounds negative to my ear, whereas jawn would be taken neutrally.
I think whatever "linguists" did this "research" must be undergraduate internet searchers. For example in Russian the words "fignya/fignyushka" or the less polite "huynya/huynyushka" are used in a very similar way. They are a noun representing an abstract "thing" that the listener would understand from context.
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 184 ms ] threadI introduce you to "kwan" (or "kuan") from Visayan, which serves the same purpose.
https://www.reddit.com/r/DoesNotTranslate/comments/jmkvbd/fi...
Kwan is not just a time-filler word like "um." You can legit use it in a sentence as an object-filler word and people still understand.
"I was surfing at the kwan and ate some kwan with hot sauce." "Was it good?" "Oh yeah!"
I kind of think that there must be a vast amount of Filipino culture I don't know about. Big population, but little penetration of the culture in mainland USA.
Absolutely loved getting the chance to participate in it here and there. I miss speaking to native speakers.
The distinction of verbs and nouns in Austronesian languages generally are pretty lax.
Also cool, Tongan and Samoan speakers found Visayan numbering mutually distinguishable -- "lima" for 5, for example.
> "[E]asy conversion of nouns to verbs has been part of English grammar for centuries; it is one of the processes that make English English."
https://www.thoughtco.com/verbing-definition-1692587
Just like "jawn" is not unique (not even within English), in my experience there's almost nothing really unique in any language.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Smurfs
https://spanish.stackexchange.com/a/4839
The "w" sound keeps repeating in the themes here, interesting.
I'm not sure if the etymology is that an egg ("huevo") looks like a zero, so a dumb person or a loser is a "huevo" (an egg, meaning a zero) or "huevón" (huge zero), or if it has to do with testicles (because in Spanish it's common to call them eggs), so a "huevón" might someone who's "as dumb as a giant testicle". "Boludo" and "pelotudo" are more like the latter, for sure, though they could still derived from zero looking like a ball.
> The "w" sound keeps repeating in the themes here, interesting.
In weón it's really just a slight change from huevón, and mostly just dropping the 'v'.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/iz%C3%A9
"i-kwan mo yung kwan" -> "just thing the thing"
E.g. "can you grab the shit from my truck" vs "can you grab the jawn"
You really need to know the difference if trying to speak Spanish: https://www.spanish.academy/blog/a-simple-guide-to-demonstra...
Edit: a_mechanic got here first: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32872443
...and as a non-native english speaker, I just learned that "all of a sudden" is slang and not just a normal part of the language.
Wow!
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=%22all%20o...
"laters" would just be a short way of saying "see you later" - but it sounds really a bit lame and try-hard to me, or the kind of thing a middle-aged, middle-class person would write as dialogue for a working class urban teenage character in a TV show. I think quickthrower2 is saying the same thing but maybe they can correct me (sounds like they're England, so they'll know better than me).
Don't worry about either, you won't hear them particularly often :)
(or less inauthentic, "nae bother")
I live outside Philly, and yes, they use jawn.
'const' is more a qualifier or an adjective than an object/thing. You wouldn't s/fast/jawn/ in the sentence "a fast car", like you can't replace const in "a const iterator"
It's a word that has endured surprisingly well, as slang goes. And it's a conspicuously egalitarian term. You'll find it used in both blue-collar and white-collar settings, and across racial lines. There's very little tribal attachment. Nobody cares if you appropriate it. The general sentiment is the more jawn users, the better.
But unfortunately, I'm afraid it may have jumped the shark when the "Jawn Morgan" billboards started appearing:
https://billypenn.com/2022/05/25/jawn-morgan-billboards-phil...
You certainly get plenty of mileage out of the word cringe. Is it a verb, is it an adjective - who knows? Your also ... also construct riffs on "either ... or", "both ... and" and the like. There must be a name for terms like that - you get them in Latin too so they've been around for a while eg nec ... necque (neither ... nor).
Jawn is just a colloquialism but I've seen also ... also several times before now. I've also seen very cringe too.
I am not taking the piss but I feel that I am watching language evolve right in front of me. I suspect that whilst this article and set of threads gets itself all whizzed up over jawn, it is missing the rather bigger point about language and conversations that travel at the speed of light instead of just sound and is distributed by the internet and not just the post office.
On HN we pontificators have an audience that a Roman Imperator could only dream of.
"Gee, 20% of this paragraph is the same word, perhaps it would serve me well to mix it up."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Same thing happens with "y'all", even though it's nowhere close to being as esoteric/regional. A couple years ago, Twitter seemed to have become obsessed with incorporating it conspicuously into every other tweet. I didn't even know "y'all" had rules until that happened. (I couldn't really tell you what those rules are, but it was popping up in places that were so syntactically awkward, by people who were clearly not "y'all" natives. So they definitely exist.)
I'm also a fan of habitual be because it's something that can be expressed in English, but it sounds verbose or relies on context whereas "I be" is self explanatory without any context -you know that the speakers means "I regularly do/feel ___ "
My favorite phrase puts them together: "ya'll be trippin" is IMO the most efficient way in the English language to tell a group of people that their behavior is unacceptable.
Ultimately, since "yous" never fits in the same grammatical slot as "use" (different part of speech), there's never any real chance at confusion anyway. Therefore I weigh in on the side of "yous".
Once again New York has it right and the rest of yous be trippin.
I was the latter circa 2012 but ~8 years in Boston tempered my use, haha.
Yinz [0] has a special place in my heart, because I was born and raised in western PA, but yinzers [1] sometimes leaving me feeling the same way.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yinz
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yinzer
It seems like the first tweet from your linked article is suggesting otherwise.
The Enduring Mystery of ‘Jawn,’ Philadelphia’s All-Purpose Noun (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20574296 - July 2019 (108 comments)
The Enduring Mystery of 'Jawn', Philadelphia's All-Purpose Noun - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11367406 - March 2016 (52 comments)
For example this is a valid sentence:
“Person 1: I was at the jawn down the street when that bad jawn from up the block walked in. But she didn’t say anything.
Person 2: oh that’s a bad jawn”
Translation:
“Person 1: I was at the place down the street when that pretty woman from up the block walked in. But she didn’t say anything.
Person 2: oh that sucks”
"“Person 1: I was at the whatever down the street when that bad whatever from up the block walked in. But she didn’t say anything.
Person 2: oh that’s a bad whatever”
?
[1] https://southpark.cc.com/clips/151539/welcome-to-marklar