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3 panel meme. First panel: "I made a new internet slang". Second panel: "New or misused AAVE?" Third panel: "Misused AAVE".the other 20% is either 4chan incel language or something trump tweeted in 2017
this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2025
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I am not sure that's true, language can absolutely be misused, when an individual uses a word in a way nobody recognizes, it fails to function as language and is worth considering genuinely misused. It's only when a "misuse" gains enough traction that people can effectively use it to communicate that it is an evolution rather than a misuse.
The point is that the language is about use, e.g. getting a concept across, and it can absolutely fail or be applied incorrectly.
Take for example if a variety of mugs are on a table and I wanted the red mug. If I said "pass me the green mug", that would be a misuse of "green" as meaning red, and it would fail to communicate, as long as there are other mugs and my meaning cannot be inferred.
If there is clearly only one mug, a person might think I was mistaken or colorblind and still get my intended meaning, but it would still be considered a misuse of "green".
If enough people used "green" to mean red, maybe because my family thought the mistake was funny and adopted "green" to mean red as an in-joke, it might grow out of being a misuse into a new meaning.
The same thing is happening when white children misuse AAVE and generate slang, "gyatt" for example meaning "god" as in "gyatt damn" becomes mistakenly applied to mean a butt because of misunderstanding about how gyatt was originally used. The misuse becomes new slang, but it could have easily remained an obscure and forgotten misuse if it didn't catch-on with enough people such that it took on a new meaning.
If enough people used “green” to refer to “red” objects, the meaning of the word would change.
See: inversion of the meaning of the word “literally”
That's a great example of a word being misused. If the way a word is used makes its meaning less clear than before, it's being misused. Since "literally" can now mean "figuratively," you don't know how a person means it without additional information. If a new word came about to mean the opposite of "figuratively," all well and good, but without it, meaning is being objectively obfuscated. Another word that suffered this fate is "nonplussed," which means "being so surprised and confused a person doesn't know how to react," but is commonly used to mean "unperturbed," its opposite. Because of this, it's usually recommended to just not use it at all, because nobody can be sure what it's supposed to mean.
This can even happen to technical terms, for example bimonthly now has both the original meaning of once every 2 months, and also means semimonthly, twice a month.
In other words it's completely worthless as a word because it fails to specify between conflicting meanings.
"Biweekly" and "biannually" have the same problem. I guess the terms have stuck because the dates they're referring to are usually specified as well. It's not much help to only know that something will happen at some point within a week, month, or year. "Okay, but when, exactly?"