Informant: “Its from League of Legends, I’ve never played the game before but I’ve heard people say it before and I know how the game works. I know its played on a field that has three lanes, top, middle, and bottom lane. And the middle lane is the most contested, so to ‘force it down mid’ means to be stubborn and tunnel vision and push it down without any worry about challenges. So you’d say it if you need to persevere through something challenging.”
Context:
The informant learned this expression through online gaming culture and conversations with friends who play League of Legends.
Analysis:
Like much of verbal folklore and especially for slang, this example relies on shared knowledge within a folk group. In this case, player’s of the game League of Legends, or people in the gaming sphere. It also functions as a folk metaphor and can be used in everyday situations. The “mid lane” becoming a metaphor for a challenge, and “forcing it” implying stubborn determination. This reflects the growing influence of internet and gaming culture, where inside references circulate rapidly among online communities and spread into everyday conversations.
Context: The informant, MV, explains the Phenomenon of online videos depicting characters from different pieces of media in “stan edit posts” that show their admiration for said character.
MV: “Online, there’s a bunch of different videos that basically consist of putting different pictures of a character and adding different transitions in between which makes it an edit. Basically a bunch of different fandoms make stan edits of their favorite characters in said fandom and post it online for others to see. They usually add really popular music to help the edit gain more attraction. I think they first started on twitter where people were making edits of different Kpop idols since stan culture is super popular in that fandom but I think that’s a different topic. They’re pretty much everywhere on social media like if u opened Insta [Instagram] right now, you’d probably find one within like a few scrolls. I honestly wish I could edit like some people can I think it’s a really great way to show your devotion to a specific character. “
Analysis: “stan character” edit videos have become a popular style of short videos through social media, mainly seen on platforms such as Instagram and TikTok. These short usually consist of rapid transitions between clips and high uses of effects. The edits are usually accompanied by pop music, usually music that’s recognizable enough to be seen by others. The edits of characters are created in order to show admiration towards the character and express appreciation towards the specific media being depicted. These edits first originated online on the platform Twitter/X, where users online made different edits/compilations of different Kpop idols. This type of editing style has since then dispersed onto other forms of media such as for characters in pop culture such as in TV Shows or video games.
AP is a 20-year-old student from Austin, Texas. She is very internet savvy and speaks extensively in cultural and internet references.
‘Slay’
AP-A word I use all of the time in different contexts is ‘slay’. I started saying it when it became a trend on TikTok and I use it to this day even though the trend has kinda died. I use it in every context because, well, everything is just so slay like, how could I not call it slay? Everything is slay to me. Every time I say slay I mean it in like an endearing almost cheering on kind of way, like oh girl you go slay that, or this is gonna slay. It’s just something that’s good or exciting or just has a light-hearted carefree vibe.
ANALYSIS: The definition of the word slay means to strike and kill, but has evolved to hold a brand new meaning to modern youth and Queer culture. The popularity of the word slay in the modern context comes primarily from LGBTQ culture and speaking habits. At some point, people began using slay to signify excellence. Instead of saying an artist ‘killed’ their performance, they ‘slayed’ their performance. Terms like ‘slay’ and ‘yass’ stem from the ball subculture, and have been used there for decades. But these terms have been coined as ‘internet words’, and are used by many people outside of the LGBTQ community with no knowledge of their origin. There are mixed feelings about the increased use of Queer terms outside of the community. It signifies an improvement in LGBTQ acceptance culturally, with more people being open and interested in Queer language. It shows that LGBTQ culture no longer has to hide and has its place in the culture mainstream. However, the Queer community is often ignored as being the originators of these terms, instead with people crediting Tiktok or Twitter. The terms have become appropriated, and are barely even connected back to Queer culture anymore. Slay is a perfect example of the interesting phenomenon that we are facing, an exterior acceptance of Queer culture while erasing the culture’s proper history.
Context: When you’re playing competitive online games, one of the most important things to learn is how to most effectively show off to the enemy. You won’t always have the time to curse them out or otherwise eloquently explain your skill to them. For this reason, different kinds of slang have been adapted to meet the needs of competitive gamers. From this, we get the gamer slang “pwn.”
Main Piece: To “pwn” someone is to, essentially, annihilate them, destroy them, or otherwise completely defeat them when it wasn’t even close. Similar slang would be “curb-stomping” or “bitch slapping.” The gist is that gamers need more ways to tell people how bad they were beaten as a part of the psychological warfare of gaming. If somebody gets angry, or “tilts,” they’ll play worse, and if they’re angry enough, they might even quit! Pwning became the go-to affirmation of dominance in gaming lobbies for much of the mid-2000s because of both its simplicity and its meme status. Informant GG shares his account of his origins in Counter Strike, a competitive first person shooter game.
Transcript:
GG: I first heard [pwned] (pronounced p-owned) in 2003; I was playing Counter Strike with my buddies, and one of them just goes “pwned!” and I said “what?” and he said “pistol owned!… so owned is like to dominate someone or to make someone your bitch using your skill, and pistol is like how we whipped out the pistol and shot a guy…” I don’t know the exact origins of it, but I’ve seen it everywhere from YouTube to memes, it’s all over the place.
Thoughts: In gaming culture, defeating a rival is a moment of great pride that one may be too excited to put into eloquent words. It is for this reason that I believe “pwn” arose from a need to accurately describe the feeling of dominance over an opponent, regardless of it’s roots as either a keystroke error (because p is next to o on the QWERTY keyboard) or as a combination of pistol and own. From GG’s perspective it certainly makes sense that killing an opponent with your pistol, a relatively weak weapon compared to rifles and machine guns, would warrant pwning, but the folklore aspect of pwning is more through why people used it and less of how they began to use it. In the mid-2000s, pwned became apart of internet meme culture because of its applicability to other scenarios. Anytime that something goes catastrophically wrong for someone, they’ve been pwned (See Know Your Meme). Using the term pwn also includes you in apart of the culture of the internet. Therefore, I believe that people used pwned primarily because of its attached feelings of dominance as well as its inclusion in internet culture.
