David Jett Explains How To Talk Good
I know. It's a joke.
My father was born in a rural area of Mississippi but had the good sense to move to Chicago, IL before impregnating my mom with me. And although he lived in the north for a decent amount of time, he still had speech idiosyncrasies that were mos def from his southern upbringing. (I had a cousin around my age named Perry, born to one of my father’s brothers who still lived in Mississippi. Perry’s nickname was Bubba. I think you get the point.) My dad pronounced any word that ended in an “a” with an “er.” The Crimson Tide was in Alabamer. If the tv went out, he had to fix the antenner. Fred Flintstone’s wife was Wilmer. My cousin Perry was Bubber. Actually, no, he wasn’t. Somehow Bubba was grandfathered in as Buh-Buh. Please don’t ask me to explain Southern speak. That is not what this is about and I don’t have the time or the Mountain Dew needed to get into that.
This is also not about other regional dialects or slang. I’m not talking about how Canadians pronounce “about” as “aboot.” I’m not talking about how everyone in Boston (and I mean every-fucking-body-in-Boston) inserts the word “wicked” after every third word. I’m not talking about people in Louisiana boiling “skrimp” or people in Tennessee getting a “skrawberry” milkshake. I’m not even talking about people saying “libary” instead of “library.” (although seeing as how the Olympics just happened, I should probably mention that it’s called a “Triathlon,” not a “Triath-a-lon” as probably about 99% of most people you know would say. Including you. You people are wicked wrong in going aboot saying that.)
What I would like to discuss are words that are used incorrectly, or misspelled or are just plain stupid in the first place.
LITERALLY: This king of misused words is literally “literally.” Most people use it as an exaggeration. “I literally lost my mind when I heard the new Post Malone track.” Or “I literally shit my pants when my wife caught me with that hooker.” The word means that it ACTUALLY HAPPENED! Like for real, for real. Now maybe someone, somewhere actually shit their pants when their wife caught them with a hooker. Maybe he said “My head literally exploded!” No, it didn’t. Unless you’re that dude from Scanners. “I literally can’t take this job anymore!” Yeah, you can. Unless you follow that sentence with “I quit right now and all y’all mother fuckers can literally suck my dick!” Actually, I would literally pay to see that but you better be pulling out that thang and letting your co-workers get in line.
SUPPOSEDLY: I know several people that pronounce this word as “supposably.” I want to think they know what the actual word is. I want to think they just have a weird speech malfunction with this one word. I want to think that Hulk Hogan isn’t a blatant racist, but supposedly there are video tapes that prove otherwise. (not supposedly, but literally.)
BABY DADDY: I don’t think there’s a term I hate more than baby daddy. This one tightly packaged phrase lets people know that you are both low-rent and easy, whether you literally are or not. Supposably, this term originated from Jamaican Creole, which I can get. It sounds very Jamaican, especially if you say things in a very stereotypical accent. “Oh, look at the little baby daddy with his little baby.” (I’m pausing here while you say that with an accent.) But here’s the deal. Let’s say you are a woman. You have a baby with a man. This man is not your husband. Maybe you are not with the father of the child in any romantic way. You could just say, when referring to the father of your child, “Steven’s father is coming over for the bbq.” Saying father, which is what any baby daddy is, is a perfectly good word. Saying baby daddy implies that even though you have a kid with this baby daddy, you are still down to clown. If I hadn’t seen the movie Baby Driver, I would have assumed it was about a dude driving his child around town while the mom is busy fucking someone else.
KNOW WHAT I MEAN: this filler speech drives me insane. (not literally) I know several people who end every sentence with “know what I mean?” No, I fucking don’t. I don’t understand words and I can’t comprehend context, and I’m deaf and didn’t hear anything you said. OF COURSE I KNOW WHAT YOU MEAN!!! YOU JUST FUCKING SAID IT!! No one ever uses this phrase at the end of a sentence I might not understand. Like “if you put too much oxygen into a bloodstream, your corpuscles might spontaneously explode unless you stick your finger into a light socket to let the electricity counteract the process. Know what I mean?” No, I don’t know what you mean! What the hell! Please explain this to me further so I don’t die! This is never the case. It’s always stuff like “I think we should vacation in Chicago this year because they have good pizza, know what I mean?” This phrase is used by simple people saying simple things and they just want validation. It’s like when a guy does the dishes and brags to his wife for a week and a half about how good and clean the dishes look. Washing dishes is a task that simply needs to be done. It’s not your thesis on husbanding.
SHOULD HAVE: This is one that’s only in writing and it’s annoying as fuck. It’s the quickest way to show that you are an illiterate idiot. I offer a caveat here to people using computers and smart phones. Auto-correct will mess you up. (when I first started using smart phones, auto-correct would always assume I wanted to type duck instead of fuck. Now, after that AI has learned my habits, if I try to talk about a water fowl and type in duck, it asks me “you wanted to say fuck, right?”) I’m not going to drag anyone if I see a “there” instead of “their” in a text or social media post. But you should’ve paid a little more attention in English class so you didn’t type “should of.” That is not auto-correct. Auto-correct isn’t that stupid. If I see a post or text with “should of,” I’m assuming you are literally a massive moron, know what I mean? (I often use the word “gonna” instead of “going to” when I’m writing. I do it for comedic rhythm. No one writing “should of” is doing that.)
YEET: I’m only including this one because a friend on Threads mentioned she was mocked for using this incorrectly. Yeet means to throw something with violent and comical force. You can yeet something out the window, but you can’t yeet out the window. The term yeet started as an exclamation of enthusiastic approval. For example, this club be lit! Yeet, yeet! It morphed in 2016 when a viral video showed a girl handing her friend a drink, saying “Hey, Terry, you want some?” Terry, upon realizing the beverage can was empty, slung that can down the school hallway and yelled “YEET!!” Thus, the sport of yeeting was born. Warning: don’t confuse Yeet with Skeet. Skeeting is a different activity and if you do it in public, someone might literally yeet your ass into a different zip code.
TEXT ABBREVIATIONS: LOL. That’s a common one. Laugh out loud. It’s what you used before there were emojis. Often when I see someone using LOL instead of the laugh emoji, I think “holy shit, that person is old.” Since I’m not a 14 year old girl, I sometimes have to google text abbreviations. IYKYK. A recent one I saw really annoyed me: ELI5. That sounds like it would be the name of a robot sidekick on an 80’s science-fiction tv show. It means “explain it to me like I’m 5.” It made me want to type ELIOV16.
Emojis were invented to do heavy lifting in an entertaining way. If you reply to a pic of a hot woman with an eggplant and water drops, that means you either have, or are planning to, jack off to previously referenced pic. She can either take this as a compliment or call the local authorities. There are a lot of sex emojis. A taco followed by a tongue means you want to eat a woman’s pussy. A taco followed by a purple face means Taco Bell let the meat sit out too long. A peach is a very nice ass. A peach followed by a tongue followed by a taco means you may be doing things in the wrong order. A woman texting a peach followed by an eggplant followed by a red no symbol means “no butt stuff.”
I once had a co-worker who became a good friend. And then, as Ron Burgundy once said, “well, that escalated quickly.” She was telling me about the one time she had anal sex. She said it hurt, quite a lot. I imagine that it did. We were progressing closer and closer to fooling around so she told me that based on that, her policy was strictly “no butt stuff.” That phrase made me laugh and I thought how great (and funny) it would be to throw that phrase, unprompted, into situations. Like in a job interview: “we would really like to hire you.” “Sounds great, but I gotta tell ya, no butt stuff.” Or, let’s say, someone asks you for help: “could you help me throw these boxes into the dumpster?” “sure thing, but no butt stuff.”
ITCH/SCRACH: this one probably annoys me the most. I can’t believe I have to explain it. You have an itch. You need to scratch it. Pretty simple. Somewhere over the last decade, people (stupid people) have started to interchange the words for no apparent reason other than they have the basic brain functions of a weasel’s dick. Someone has an itch they can’t reach and says to a friend, “hey, come itch me.” No. Absolutely not. They can come scratch you, but they can’t come “itch” you. That’s fucking not what that fucking word means. You can’t just all of sudden decide a word has a different meaning. Try to do that and I’m literally gonna have to yeet you across the street. There are some dictionaries that maintain that if a word is commonly used for a meaning, even though that is not the word’s meaning, that it now has that meaning. Again, get outta here with that noise. If thousands of people decide to start calling the ceiling a “floor” that doesn’t make it a floor. It’s a ceiling. The word floor can’t mean both the floor and the ceiling. Do people not get why we have words?
Wrestlers have a unique language. It started, along with wrestling, in the carnival circuit. This wrestler language, called carny, was once only known by people in the wrestling business. But as the internet came along and provided people with an expanded world view and knowledge base, carny words began to be used by fans and the secret language became not so secret. You may have heard terms like heel, face, broadway, kayfabe. One of the carny words is “gimmick.” Gimmick has multiple meanings, similar to aloha. It can mean a wrestler’s persona. “the Undertaker has one of the best gimmicks ever!” It can mean a foreign object such as a chain that a heel might use to win a match. “ok, so Ric Flair is about to lose the match, so he hits the babyface with a gimmick.” Wrestlers use the term gimmick so much that it now means just about anything in the known universe. I’ve been at a restaurant with wrestlers and heard one of them say “hey, could you pass me the gimmick?” Salt, pepper, hot sauce… what do you want? Use your words! I once worked with a woman whose husband was into wrestling and even logged some time as a wrestling manager. He used the word gimmick around her so often that one day at work some dude came in wearing an extremely stupid hat and she said to me “that hat gimmick isn’t working.” I may not have heard a funnier statement from anyone who wasn’t me.
Words have meanings. Those meanings might change over time. But a word doesn’t change its meaning just because you use it incorrectly. And using some words just makes you sound stupid. You don’t have to be a Poet Laureate to sound intelligent. But people do take notice of what you say and how you say it and it will definitely influence how they think of you. So, if you have a baby daddy who literally talks all wrong, tell him he should of thought about that before someone like me yeets his gimmick ass across the room. And remember, even though I used the word “ass,” I have a strict “no butt stuff” policy.