I curate a newsletter that keeps up to date (or at least attempts to keep up to date) with Gen Z and Gen Alpha slang, and “type shit”, also spelled as “type s”, “type shi” or “type shiii”, threw me for a loop when I found it on this teacher’s ban list:
Via Reddit
Apparently, the young ’uns are saying it to affirm whatever was said before. Here’s an example given by a Reddit user:
Lexicographer Jesse Sheidlower has been researching and writing about fuck for a fucking long time: nearly three decades. He’s also been an invaluable resource for the Strong Language blog since our very beginnings (almost ten years!). To celebrate the publication of the fourth edition of his magnum opus, The F-Word, we asked Sheidlower to share with Strong Language readers a bit about the book’s history, his research process, and what he likes to do when he’s not reading and writing about fuck. The interview was conducted over email.
Drumroll, please: The brand-new fourth edition of The F-Word, the definitive lexicon of the English language’s favorite and most notorious four-letter word, celebrates its publication by Oxford University Press this week. Edited by Jesse Sheidlower, who has shepherded the project since its inception in 1995, the new book is an impressive work of scholarship and an essential addition to the bookshelf of any serious swear-lover.
The first edition, published when Sheidlower was 27 and “one of lexicography’s bright young stars” (per the jacket copy), contained 232 pages. Nearly 30 years later, the new edition comprises 504 pages, more than 150 new entries, almost 150 antedatings (earlier appearances of a word or expression), and more than 2,500 new quotations.
What will you find in the new fourth edition? A lot more on fuck with, to take just one example. Fuck with didn’t appear at all as a separate entry in the book’s first edition; in the third edition Sheidlower provided only two senses for the term: “to meddle with (maliciously)” and “to tease (playfully).”
It now has six senses, starting with the nonlexicalized literal sense “to have sexual intercourse with,” which Sheidlower had previously omitted “because, well, it’s nonlexicalized, but this time I felt that people might complain about its absence.” You’ll also find the new sense 3, with three subsenses: “to associate with”; “to use; engage with”; and “to like; to appreciate.” Sheidlower comments: “I think these are interesting, and defining and dividing them up was interesting and challenging, and they go back a number of decades and there are a lot of good quotes from good people.” (Newly added senses are highlighted here, but not in the print edition, with a NEW glyph: 🆕.)
What an enshittified election season we’ve been living through in the U.S. of A.! I’m speaking here of language, of course: of Donald Trump’s “shit vice president” remark, in reference to Democratic candidate Kamala Harris, covered in this space just a few days ago by Ben Yagoda (and which even the usually dainty New York Times printed without expurgation); of traded accusations of “bullshit” by TV host Anderson Cooper and radio host Charlamagne tha God on Cooper’s CNN show over the network’s lopsided reporting on Trump and Harris; and of “chickenshit” hurled at the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, whose billionaire owners separately broke with tradition and prevented their papers’ editorial boards from endorsing a presidential candidate.
But the shit compound that drew the most – and the most gleeful – coverage was uttered in an address given by Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, the Democratic vice presidential candidate, at a rally in Madison, Wisconsin, on October 22. The word was dipshit, and it wasn’t about anyone on either ticket.
You may be familiar with the British English slang “dogging”—what they call having sex in public. Lately a new term has slid into English, possibly related to that, or maybe stemming from the sexual position, called “rawdogging,” meaning to have unprotected sex. The etymology remains unclear.
As a sexual term it’s common enough, but through a process of semantic bleaching it now also has a more relaxed sense of doing anything difficult sans creature comfort.
An early instance of this use of “rawdogging” was to describe airline passengers forgoing entertainment and other luxuries. If you opt to stare out the window or the back of the seat in front of you throughout a four-hour flight, you’re rawdogging the trip.
“It may have originated with Gen Z, with the trend gaining speed on TikTok. Influencer Sophi Cooke posted a video of her mother rawdogging a flight, and some TikTok users commented that it was a dopamine detox.”
Rawdoggers in transit forgo movies, books, and the rawdoggiest might even eschew meals and drinks. It’s been described as “a search for purity that cannot be achieved.” In other words, you might imagine a stint in solitary confinement to be not particularly difficult, but in practice, sooner or later, most start to go bonkers.
Update: For additional perspective, here’s a podcast generated on this topic that delves into the psychological implications of how rawdogging can enhance one’s engagement with reality.
Strong Language 