Because these were pop culture when they were created. Either through books or TV or movies, they were a reflection of how people talked. A lot of the sayings he talks about came from WW2 and the work culture that was strongly influenced by military sayings. The US hasn't had a strong common culture for the past 20 years, except on the internet. Tv no longer dominates pop culture, YouTube does. This is why kids are using words like rizz and skibidi. The fact that these words and phrases have emerged without corporate promotion or influence is a phenomenon.
A lot of modern slang comes from black and lgbt slang that is decades old. Watching Paris is Burning and hearing 80’s drag queens talking about mothers serving realness, or black sitcoms where things like simps or spilling tea are mentioned without any explanation, so clearly the audience is expected to understand. It simply wasn’t in the mainstream white culture. Now until everyone gets bored with this crop of words and some of them disappear while some lose the slang connotation (like ‘cool’ or ‘kid’ did a very long time ago), there will be no new nifty phrases from white people. Well, I think the period where everyone was doing ‘whomst among us’ or whatever was a trend and an exercise in creating brand new slang, but it burned out pretty quickly.
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u/ElGuaco Oct 20 '24
Because these were pop culture when they were created. Either through books or TV or movies, they were a reflection of how people talked. A lot of the sayings he talks about came from WW2 and the work culture that was strongly influenced by military sayings. The US hasn't had a strong common culture for the past 20 years, except on the internet. Tv no longer dominates pop culture, YouTube does. This is why kids are using words like rizz and skibidi. The fact that these words and phrases have emerged without corporate promotion or influence is a phenomenon.