Online, "highkey" is a modifier that means "very," "a lot," "intensely," or "much." And as Twitter makes clear, since he introduced these two adverbs to the masses, their definitions have been stretched. It often indicates a user profile.īut Drake's use of millennial lingo is on point as always. Each term he defines is traced back through time, often centuries, with citations showing how English speakers used it along the way.Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders. This means that, for the first time ever, this referential treasure can now be accessed by anyone.
Having struggled to draw subscribers to his database (or find a publisher willing to provide ongoing support for his work), Green recently decided to make his historical dictionary of more than 135,000 words and phrases available for free, clams be damned. Unfortunately, despite the public’s enduring fascination with slang, scholarly treatments of it can be a tough sell. We want to put our arms around each other, as an element of self-defense.” A treat for readers “It confirms that we’re together and it confirms that you’re not one of us,” Green says. It can also bind people and define the boundaries of the gang. Slang can be mean and uncaring and disgusting. It has always been used, on some level, to say “we are the marginal folk,” as he puts it. Per Green, the earliest known slang was used among criminal groups centuries ago, as a way to keep their communication from being understood by authorities. (See this Know Your Meme writeup on a related usage of wig, tracing it back to African American Vernacular English.) Slang can “condense so many emotions and attitudes in a concise, powerful way,” Sherwood says. He suspects the term, which is used to mean perfect or on point, originally comes out of drag-queen culture - perhaps suggesting something is so shockingly good that it warrants the expression one would make if a wig were snatched off their head. Snatched, Sherwood says, may be an example that came from LGBTQ speakers. Slang, as Zimmer explains, allows “cultural groups to create their own kind of territory through language.” When a word seeps beyond the original group who uses it to signal shared attitudes, that can be just as hurtful for the old speakers as it is exciting for the new ones. The history of a word like cool, for one, is not just about a gap between generations but representation and appropriation.
And slang terms are often used to forge bonds in subcultures, as well as in-crowds and youth. Much American slang has gone mainstream after being invented by African Americans. It may turn out that the newer lowkey can be traced back to a particular demographic, revealing something about the flow and tug of culture and language.
And they will likely do a better job if the public lends a hand. But there’s more nuance and variance to it, the kind that professionals like Green and Sherwood distill from looking at piles and piles of examples that show how a word has been used over time by various communities. So what do they mean? Some people say they use lowkey to mean kinda or to verbally mark something that should be kept private, while they might use highkey to suggest that they’re trying to be relaxed about something and failing.
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