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submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by doublepepperoni@hexbear.net to c/chapotraphouse@hexbear.net

This shit drives me up the wall even more than "unalive"

You can't stop people saying slurs but an entire generation will subconsciously alter their entire vocabulary because they grew up on corporate platforms with very heavily moderated text chats and comment sections and they ended up internalising the filters matt-joker

Edit: I was not aware of the AAVE origins of "ahh" which pushes it more towards the territory of legit slang. Still, I stand by my general point about automated moderation influencing language being bad

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[-] doublepepperoni@hexbear.net 16 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Whenever I've googled the phenomenon I've come across explanations like this

It is an algorithm-friendly way of saying "ass", similar to how "unalive" is an algorithm-friendly way of saying "dead" or "suicide". It's self-censorship, although many of these terms evolve beyond censorship into "real words"/slang very quickly - especially when they're being used by people and in places where being "TikTok/YouTube-friendly" is irrelevant.

On the other hand, I'm a pasty white nerd from Europe so I wouldn't know

[-] MizuTama@hexbear.net 3 points 2 months ago

Yeah from what it looks like it sounds like how a lot of black folks pronounce ass, I wouldn't be surprised if it was some Frankenstein'd abomination of both censorship and appropriation though.

[-] doublepepperoni@hexbear.net 5 points 2 months ago

Black folks say arse???????

I just don't get how you get ahh from ass limmy-what

[-] MizuTama@hexbear.net 10 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

A lot of us don't pronounce the -ss in ass so it sounds like a held ah-. If you know Japanese it's like the っ in a word like natsu vs nattsu. It sounds almost like a pause in a sentence. Depending on the sentence it may also sound like aa instead. Thing is, we don't really write it like that, at least up til my gen, idk bout these kids but it looks like a literal writing of the pronunciation. A similar thing is done with iono (don't think that one is very common though) which stands for I don't know and is based on the almost slurred together way it's said from dropping consonants in speech.

[-] doublepepperoni@hexbear.net 5 points 2 months ago

I'm familiar with the concept, but in my head I intuitively pronounced the a in "ahh" like car, not like cat

[-] MizuTama@hexbear.net 4 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Oh, nah, I'm pretty sure it's both depending on the region. AAVE has regional differences and I think that pronunciation is one of them

I do think the a in car is more common though, mostly has to do with how the predominant regional accent influences your pronunciation is my guess, but I'm not a massive linguistics nerd so that's a fairly uneducated hypothesis

[-] doublepepperoni@hexbear.net 3 points 2 months ago

So there are places in the US where people pronounce ass like arse thinking-about-it

[-] MizuTama@hexbear.net 2 points 2 months ago

arse

I presume so. I've never heard the full word pronounciation, but I've definitely heard it with the dropped consonant, so I presume anyone in the region who says it with the consonant pronounce it that way. I'm actually lowkey losing it because I have no idea how I've heard one without the other...

[-] Xavienth@lemmygrad.ml 2 points 2 months ago

"I unno" isn't all that rare to see typed out

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this post was submitted on 23 Apr 2025
108 points (99.1% liked)

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