Category Archives: Opinion

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Contemporary Slang 101 (with 12 UCAS points)

Ladies and Gents, buckle yourselves up for the wild ride that is Contemporary Slang 101. This is where we’ll get down and groovy with the words that young’uns are using these days. If you were born before the year 2000, this is for you…

Think of it as a crash course in street-smart lingo, an introduction into a secret society of cool, or a lesson into “how to impress your friends while sounding like you’re still in touch with reality.”

So, what exactly is “contemporary slang?”

It’s the language of the people, the pulse of the youths, the verbal expression of all things #HipAndHappening. It’s what you hear when your kids talk to their mates, or when you’re scrolling through TikTok or memes (we’ll get to those). And just like fashion, these terms change faster than you can say “Who wore it better?”

So why don’t we start decoding this charming and colourful collection of words and phrases, so that we sound a bit less like our grandpas, and more the kool-gang who play ruggers (no offence grandpas!)

Abbreviations

Many slang terms take the form of initialisms, contractions and acronyms. Take:

  • LOL (Laugh out loud); RO[T]FL (Rolling on [the] floor laughing)

LOL does NOT mean “lots of love,” so don’t tell your children “Sorry you failed your test, honey, lol” …

The term was first used in the 1980s by Wayne Peterson, to denote a more extreme laughter than “hahaha,” and whilst the meaning mostly remains, today, the term in all lower-case is occasionally used ironically to convey the lack of funniness of something.

Example:

A “Why did the chicken cross the road? To get to the other side!”

B “lol” (i.e you’re not funny)

Other examples of abbreviations:

  1. tbh/tbf – to be honest/ to be fair
  2. smn/sm1 – something/someone
  3. icl/ngl – i can’t lie/ not gonna lie (to be serious about smn)
  4. alr – alright/ok
  5. np – no problem
  6. acc – actually
  7. fr – for real (are you serious; acc?)
  8. bae – “before anyone else” (a significant other)
  9. bf, bff, gf – boyfriend, best friend (bff), girlfriend
  10. idk – I don’t know
  11. irl – in real life
  12. [gonna – going to ( can be used irl)]

(Use at your own caution.)

Example:

“we r alr to come over later, idk if ur still free”

Translation: “we are alright to come over later, not sure if you’re still free…”

Food

Many words take the form of synonyms in slang. One of the most common words that take slang, is “food.”

The most common is “scran,” which as originally slang for a “bar tab,” in the 1700s. Later, it was coined as a verb, “out on the scran” meaning begging for food. Scran was often used to describe scrappy pieces of food or left over, until the military began using it to mean “ration meals.” It is likely to have been influenced by the word skran, Icelandic for junk.

The term “bussin” is said to have come about from TikTok, where a trend of “furiously gripping food” became a way to show its deliciousness. Food hence crumbled and burst into pieces, which led to the word “bussin” being used to describe tasty scran.

The term “peng” is also commonly used to describe something as impressive, or appealing, for example, “this cake is peng!” It was derived from the word for cannabis popularised by reggae music, Kushungpeng, but bares no relation to drugs at all in a modern context.

In order to describe food as average, or rubbish, the default is “mid,” suggesting mediocrity or “mid-of-the-range”, or “wack,” originally African-American vernacular, now meaning bad.

Contemporary idioms

This is probably the hardest part to grasp. A lot of teenagers and children form their personality from an overdose of social media, leading to them talk in riddles, dressing up like every other person who uses Instagram, and glued to their phones.

Contemporary idioms are a collection of random phrases used as “default reactions” to things, with little or no meaning, relevant or not. The constant use of these have become commonplace, so here we go…

  • No Cap

If something is “no cap,” it is true, and not a lie. One interpretation of this is how caps are used to hide things: contents of a bottle, an ugly haircut etc. So for there to be no cap, everything is honest, and revealed…

  • Rent free

If you just can’t stop thinking about something, or something is iconic, we say it lives “rent free” in my head, as it pays no bills to the landlord that is forgetting.

  • Caught in 4k

You’re caught eating Marmite in a no Marmite zone! We’d say you’ve been “caught in 4K” (caught red handed).

  • Mission failed successfully

You accidentally fall off a tightrope, but end up landing on a double backflip. You failed, but did something cool. Your mission? Failed successfully.

  • Bare

Whilst conventionally it means “a lacking of,” it’s most commonly used to mean “a lot of” or “really.” That’s bare weird!

  • Lowkey

Lowkey, it’s used as a quantifier like “kind of” or “pretty.” However, lowkey is used to voice a non-personal opinion, to avoid offending someone. You might be thinking: lowkey that’s kinda weird?

Well there you have it: a taster into the world of slang.

Also, 12 more UCAS points 😉

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Adventure Time And The Question Of Identity

Adventure Time is a Cartoon Network children’s animated show created in 2010 by Pendleton Ward. It tells the story of a 13 year old boy called Finn, and his talking dog, Jake. While this premise may sound childish and silly, the show deals with a lot of hard philosophical questions. One of these questions is the question of identity: who are we and why are we that way?

Through various means, a being named Fern came to life after a grass demon merged with Finn’s sword (“The Finn Sword,” which was created after Finn was forced to destroy an alternative version of himself). Fern is convinced that he is in fact, Finn. He talks the same, he acts the same and most importantly he has all of Finn’s memories. In philosophy, identity is the relation each thing bears only to itself. However, what defines a person as that person?

A thought experiment that explores this question is the Ship of Theseus. Imagine a ship leaves the port of Theseus with a full crew. On its journey, parts of the ship have to be replaced — the planks, the sail, the mast etc. — until finally, when the ship eventually returns to Theseus, every piece of the ship as well as the crew has been replaced.

Is this the same ship?

Suppose that it is the same ship and that simply its physical form has changed, with the ship itself maintaining a kind of non-physical “essence.” If you think that, you must believe in another world of existence beyond the physical, namely the metaphysical. This would mean that you are a dualist, that you believe in both the physical and the metaphysical states of being. At what point did the ship become a ship? What makes the ship what it is? If the ship has an undeniable identity, will it ever end?

Esse est percepi is a philosophical concept which I’m sure many keen Latinists will have translated already: “To be is to be perceived.” This means that existence is contingent on the observation of others. Many theologians would say that the reason why things continue to exist is because of God. God is eternal, and so therefore his observant eye keeps us rooted in existence. This solves the problem of when the existence of the ship ends (never), but it does not solve the problem of when it became the ship in the first place. An answer for this would be when we name it.

In John 1:1 we read, “In the beginning there was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” This implies the importance and power of words. So maybe it is simply when we name something that it takes a distinct identity.

On the other hand, if you take a physicalist position and believe that it is not the same ship, this view also raises problems. For example, at what point did the ship cease to be the ship? If the ship is purely physical, then the ship consists only of its physical form. If the original physical form of the ship has been changed, is this still the same ship? If you are a physicalist, you would say that it is not the same ship. The identity of the ship was comprised of its specific parts; therefore this ship that has arrived is not the same ship as it does not have these parts.

What if only one plank was removed from the ship? Would it still be the same? If someone’s arm is removed, are they still that same person? The problem for the physicalist is where the identity of something ends, whereas for the dualist it is where something starts.

So in conclusion, Fern is not Finn from both a metaphysical and physical stand point: he does not have Finn’s body, nor does he have Finn’s “soul” as such. He does however have his memories, but unless you consider that a form of metaphysical identity then Fern is not Finn.

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On The Morality of Lolita

LOLITA, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

Lolita is one of those pieces of art that lives in a state of liminality. Once banned as pornography, “Lolita” or Dolores Haze, became a staple in modern pop culture, even luring in her own celebrity fans from Nick Cave to Lana Del Rey. Her iconic red-heart glasses and cherry-painted lips would become symbols of seductive female sexuality, but we often forget the true Dolores, the young girl “standing four feet ten in one sock,” and remember instead the “nymphet,” a type of girl the narrator describes as “between the age limits of nine and fourteen… who bewitch travellers, twice or many times older than they, and reveal their true nature which is not human, but nymphic.”

This word derives from Ancient Greek myths that tell tales of nymphs and their exploits. These mystical, fairy-like beings deemed “not entirely of this world” would entrap men, and once a man has fallen in love, he is never able to let go. Nabokov once stated that he believes all great novels to be “fairy tales,” and to us he left Lolita, perhaps the most twisted fairy in all the tales.

Despite the novel’s popularity, it is infuriatingly ambiguous and is therefore often misread. Humbert Humbert is an unreliable narrator, a complete narcissist who throughout the entirety of the book had no regard for any of his actions. Despite this, many readings of Lolita have painted Dolores Haze, the 12 year old girl on the receiving end of Humbert’s delusional obsession, as the manipulator. Many early critics interpreted Humbert as an innocent person, hapless to his desires, and Dolores as the preying villain who instigated the events that ensue. In Lionel Trilling’s review of the novel he stated “…it is Lolita who ravishes Humbert,” and the esteemed literary and film critic Richard Schickel deemed Dolores to be “…that most repugnant of all females, a mid twentieth-century pubescent American girl-woman.”

Even on the internet, within the heavily romanticised sub-cultures of Tumblr that praise the “nymphet aesthetic,” Lolita and the aesthetic she has created is described as “very flirtatious…act[ing] as if she’s innocent (even though she knows she’s not) [with] a lot of child-like energy.”

Believe it or not, this “child like” energy is most likely because Dolores Haze is in-fact a child! As such, Lolita cannot fall into the category of a femme fatale (a woman who uses seduction as a vehicle to achieve her devious plans) yet as Nabokov’s work is entwined with intrinsically beautiful poetic lines, such as

  • “Human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece”;
  • “Life is just one small piece of light between two eternal darkness”;
  • and “We loved each other with a premature love, marked by a fierceness that so often destroys adult lives”

many readers miss Humbert’s distorted perspective on reality and view Dolores wrongly as a “corrupt Juliet.”

This view is visible in the overly-romanticised songs and films and “nymphet” Tumblr aesthetic. These interpretations let Humbert off the hook, seeing him as an honest man who is simply weak toward his urges toward young girls. But it is not the responsibility of underage girls to protect themselves from predators, and it is urgent that we recognise the true nature of young Dolores Haze, not as a seductive “nymphet” but as a child and a victim.

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Paper Argument

Paper is the most essential resource on the planet.

Uniting society, our society, it holds history by the hand, documenting our greatest most fatal events through books, magazines, drawings, and most importantly McDonald’s receipts (which allow us to redeem a discounted Big Mac through completing a survey).

And I think that we owe our knowledge to the timely tree, wise and mystical, which allows us to tap into our past with the flick of a page. Almost never do we really consider the travesty the world could’ve been if paper didn’t exist, since we are so entrapped by mere existence of paper as a given. We have lost touch with the appreciation of the simple aspects of our heritage, and I think it is a severe consequence of the direction society is heading into. So I ask you to ponder the question:

Does paper paper?

The Directional confuzzlement

Intercontinentally, paper has reached mass popularity, but not through the importance of its role as a key part of the Earth, but from rather how it serves our selfish Homosapien existences which begs the question…

Which way does the toilet roll roll ?

Exhibit A presents the over position. To the masses, this is the default, with over 70% of people (in various surveys) agreeing with this. It presents the benefit that one’s hands won’t touch the wall if your hands are dirty (with food obviously); that it’s easier to grasp the more accessible exposed segment; and it provides the opportunity to “fold in” the final end in a hospitality situation to give a look of ptang and shazam to the roll. One downside is that practically everyone takes on this style, so if you’re looking to be quirky or stand out, or even convert your occupation to “clown,” this is the way to go.

Exhibit A

Exhibit B presents the under position, a method of presenting a roll that is near blasphemous. Like why? Well, one reason is that the end piece of paper can be hidden from view, creating a cleaner look. If one has a cat or toddler, they have absolutely no chance at unrolling it and leaving you with a mess to clean up. It also reduces the chance of unrolling as the wall acts as a kind of “breaking system” to rotation of the toilet roll. But it’s wrong.

Exhibit B

Overall, toilet paper’s role in social constructionism has caused many paper arguments (*Bah-dum Tsk*). For example, it has probably ended a few too many marriages. Many of us are born into an orientation and stick with it, looking in disgust at the other side of this argument. Others of us feel peer pressured to conform to societal standards. Christopher Peterson, professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, suggests that it is a matter of “tastes, preferences, and interests” rather than “attitudes, traits, norms, and needs.”

So I ask you: is there really a correct way?

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Tate: Rise and Fall of the “Top G”

From Big Brother to social media’s central stage, you must have heard of Andrew Tate: he’s a controversial influencer and pyramid scheme owner not particularly known for being… let’s say…”orthodox.” Some may call him a genius, most call him a misogynist (spoilers: he is).

However, we all ask ourselves the same thing:

“Where did [‘The Top G’] come from, where did [‘The Top G’] go? Where did [‘The Top G’] come from… (Cotton-Eyed Joe)”

Chapter I: The Break

Despite being named world champion kick-boxer in two different weight divisions in 2013, Tate first achieved public fame in 2016, entering the seventeenth season of Big Brother. 

Whilst on set, Tate came under scrutiny for his homophobic and racist comments on the internet. A video of Tate beating a woman surfaced, which initiated the connotations we know to his today, although he later described it as “consensual.”

Chapter II: The Crumble

In 2017, the times caught up. Tate’s misogynistic tweets and comments led to the suspension of all three of his Twitter accounts. He was never to be on the internet again… or was he…?

In 2022, Tate established himself as trending:

11 April 2022: Tate’s house is raided by Romanian police after an allegation of him holding someone hostage.

August 2022: Tate is permanently banned from Instagram (4.7m followers) and Facebook for breaching the terms of content.

September 2022: TikTok, where over a 13 billion hashtags featuring the name “Tate” had been used. Andrew Tate’s account was banned following his controversial opinions, including his “breathe air” anti-vaping tirade (followed by deeply inhaling a Cuban Cigar), as well as the fact that he would not administrate CPR to a liberal.

Chapter III : The Fall

Tate is currently banned on all social media: YouTube, Twitter… you name it. However, despite this, he has gained a pretty hefty amount of money from both his attention and “Hustlers University,”, a supposed Pyramid sche- i mean… platform, where you can become the next “Top G”.

Most recently, Tate made an appearance on Piers Morgan’s Uncensored, where he defended his opinions on the importance of “traditional masculine values,” which you can watch for yourself here. I would definitely recommend all with strong feelings about Andrew “Cobra” Tate to consider watching the interview: a perfect melange of childish waffle and provocative opinions (emphasis on “waffle”).

Question is… what do you think?

 

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Why I don’t like Boris Johnson: the rise of populism and the death of reason

If he is blue collar, he is likely to be drunk, criminal, aimless, feckless and hopeless, and perhaps claiming to suffer from low self-esteem brought on by unemployment.

– Boris Johnson

The concept of oxymoron is a well established one in the literary field, and one to which I found myself turning upon reading my schoolfellow’s article entitled ‘Boris Johnson, the Working Class Hero.’ In the interest of political balance, I feel I should offer some points of rebuttal alongside my own fears regarding the rising tide of populism in the UK and beyond.

Johnson at Eton College

 

Let us begin by looking at Boris Johnson’s Eton days. Not only did he attend the school, he was also a member of ‘Pop’ or the Eton Society, making him an elite of the elites, far from a ‘working class hero’ as some may claim. At school, his teachers claim he ‘adopted a disgracefully cavalier attitude to his classical studies’, an approach which he has brought also to his prime minister-ship (as detailed in my previous article) with countless allegations of lockdown rule-breaking in government.

At Oxford, Johnson was a member of the infamous Bullingdon Club, notorious for sexism, vandalism, and bullying. The club’s recruiter during his time said about Johnson: “Boris was one of the big beasts of the club. He was up for anything. They treated certain types of people with absolute disdain, and referred to them as ‘plebs’ or ‘grockles’, and the police were always called ‘plod’. Their attitude was that women were there for their entertainment.”

Johnson alongside David Cameron in the Bullingdon Club

 

Is this really the man we want leading our country?

After Oxford, Johnson worked for The Times; however, once again his ‘disgracefully cavalier attitude’ led him to invent a quote from his godfather, historian Sir Colin Lucas, which resulted in being fired from the newspaper. Events like this permeate Johnson’s career, from his extramarital affairs, partygate, and wallpaper gate, to his unlawful attempt to prorogue parliament and mislead the Queen. Furthermore, his claim that we send £350m per week to the EU was, according to the UK Statistics Authority, a ‘misleading’ figure.

Perhaps it is this cavalier attitude which explains the popularity of Boris Johnson, his charisma evident even to his harshest critics; however, looking into his past, beneath the veneer of populism, we can see yet another elitist, Etonian, Oxbridge educated, lying Prime Minister. Some working class hero.

 

 

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Why I like Boris Johnson, the working class hero!

My hero!

Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, controversial to some, disliked by many, astonishing to most … and a hero to me.  Out of touch with electoral opinion and swept along by fashionable idealism, my classmates usually ignore political realism and oppose my perfect view of Boris. Here is why they are wrong!

A liberal conservative, Boris is serious and charming, scruffy but smart, impulsive, exuberant and the first British leader in generations who genuinely appears to be having a good time.  People laugh with Boris, not at him.

Through a time of upset and despair, Boris is the right man at the right time. He’s exactly what this country needs, a politician liked by the masses. Not so much a Dick Whittington rags to riches London mayor but rather a politician with the style and charisma of an Eton mess.

It’s difficult to argue with the Boris’s core political principles: freedom, peace through strength, fiscal responsibility, free markets, and human dignity. With the firm, velvet glove style of leadership, Boris has made Britain great again, picking us up when we were down, leading us from Brexit despair, when they thought it was all over, to 1966-style victory.

Not satisfied with winning mayoral elections alone, Boris championed a working class victory over the red wall with 365 seats won at our last election, increasing the Conservative presence in the House of Commons by 47 seats, the most commanding election win since 1987.

With a solid majority in place, Boris has guided his Brexit vision across the finish line, beat Covid personally, and nationally and led us through the catastrophic pandemic. He has emerged with the belief that we need to shift power and wealth to the left behind regions who delivered his greatest victory. Boris is making good on a long-standing promise to the working-class voters who made him Prime Minister. He is a working class hero!

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The Evolution of Social Media

Social media is a big part of people’s lives and some even make a living from it. We wake up everyday and the first thing we check is social media.

In 2004, Facebook was released to the world and quickly became the first widespread social media app which now has 2.85 billion monthly active users. Twitter and Instagram followed shortly after and recently TikTok joint the list. At first, social media existed to help end users connect digitally with friends, colleagues, family members as well as like-minded individuals they might never have met in person. No-one expected social media to become the extravaganza it is today.

A recent study says that people spend an average of 2 hours and 24 minutes every day on social media. So what are we doing in this time? Endlessly scrolling till it puts us to sleep or are drawn into the ads which lead us to online shopping sprees? Social media has allowed for many amazing things to happen such as helping people find their voice and helping spread kindness online to those who need it. However, multiple studies have found a strong link between heavy social media and an increased risk for depression, anxiety, loneliness and even suicidal thoughts. Social media may make you compare yourself to others and completely pick apart your appearance or some may experience cyber bullying and feel like there’s no escape.

Luckily today there is much more support online than there was in the early days of social media. It has evolved to help those with negative experiences — whether it’s on or off the screen — to seek comfort and support. Social media also helps us shape our interests and discover more about the world outside of our local town. I believe we all must use this platform we have been given to help spread our voice to battle real issues in the world such as climate change. Simply put, we all must choose kindness online.

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Valentine’s Day

Is Valentine’s Day a holiday to show your devotion to your loved ones OR a scam constructed by capitalist businesses to suck money out of our pockets. (Or both?!)

Valentine’s Day is thought to have originated from the Roman festival, Lupercalia, where young boys and girls would become a couple and some would even get married! The Christian church then decided to use this festival as a way to remember St. Valentine.

St. Valentine is speculated to have been a priest in the third century AD, who, when marriages had been banned by emperor Claudius II, arranged them in secret and was subsequently thrown in jail. Having fallen in love with the jailer’s daughter, he sent her a love letter on the day of his execution, 14th February, and signed it “from your Valentine.” And so the seed that grew into the celebration we know today was planted.

However these days society has created a pressure to give gifts on Valentine’s Day and large scale companies use this as a way to sell cheap, single-use, heart shaped merchandise.

So how do people really feel about Valentine’s Day? Here are the opinions of some of the journalism group:

  • ‘It is a capitalist scam, which makes single people feel lonely and people in relationships feel pressured to waste their money’
  • ‘Valentine’s Day makes your wallet very light’
  • ‘It’s sound’
  • ‘I love Valentine’s Day as it gives people a reason to buy me presents’
  • ‘It promotes buying cheap rubbish that it not as meaningful as handmade gifts, but gifts are not the only way to show affection’

So maybe we need to rethink Valentine’s Day and how we celebrate it, and perhaps bring it back to what it is really about: sharing the love that brought about the celebration we now know. The Charity Committee are a great example of this as they are using this celebration to collect money to help the homeless.

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I murmur: “It’s a work meeting”

Cartoon by Elliot

When Sartre’s Roquentin sits on a tram seat, he loses faith in language:

‘I murmur: “It’s a seat,” a little like an exorcism. But the word stays on my lips: it refuses to go and put itself on the thing.’ – Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

Needless to say, I found myself in a similar position upon hearing the government’s response to allegations of Downing Street “Work Meetings.” I have therefore resolved to discover what separates our notion of a party from a work meeting.

Having stumbled upon a fairly psychological question, and I myself being neither a psychologist nor possessing a particularly scientific disposition, my layman’s perusal of Wikipedia has led me to conclude that we could apply Bartlett’s theory of schemata to this situation. Bartlett claims that our brains structure knowledge based on schemata derived from past experience. Hence, our experience of parties leads us to develop an understanding of their features, features which would not, perhaps, be commonplace in a work meeting. Features such as drinking wine or eating cheese; features like bringing one’s own booze. Perhaps the reason No. 10’s excuses ring (as is becoming customary) with the hollow tintinnabulation of an empty claim is due to this disparity between our understanding and its incompatibility with what we are told. In other words, they take us for fools.

Work meeting…?

More worrying, however, would be the prospect that these parties were in fact work meetings. As former government official Sonia Khan has explained, there exists within Downing Street a “drinking culture”, with drinking having become normalised. We are faced, therefore, with two possibilities. Either the PM is lying in a desperate bid to once again save his skin, or, the culture of drinking during work has become so normal that a Downing Street work meeting really is a bring your own booze event.

So, reader, I shall let you decide, are we being led by drunkards or liars? (Or both.)