Nothing exists except as an opinion, and that opinion can only be communicated to people who already get it. If you don’t know the lingo, you can’t know the truth.
Instagram Baddie. A young lady with remarkable skill and patience spends considerable time applying cosmetics. The result is flawless. Impeccable. Instantly classic. She is beautiful, but why? Not to attract a mate and procreate. Not to impress or suppress a rival. Not even take satisfaction in her own beauty and talent, to reflect on her self-worth as a self-realized creature captured in a selfie. No, she does it for one reason only: the lingo.
Incel. A young man, raised in a world of Chads bagging Bettys, is taught that sexual satisfaction is his right. His right as a human, his right as a man, his right as a horny man. But the same world explains to him that rights are just promises and promises are made to be broken. Women, otherwise powerless, deny him what’s rightfully his. So he goes online and ejaculates epithets at the XX species. His seed impregnates other young men trapped in their virginity, and they conceive more hate and vitriol. So what. It’s been happening forever. But now we have a word for it.
An interesting word, maybe even a fun word. A label, yes, but calling an orange and apple doesn’t make it red. The word is fun to throw around, to say, to pretend to describe.
“I paid for dinner, you should have sex with me.”
“Fuckin’ incel.”
“No I’m not.”
“When you post about it on r/redpill, don’t forget to tell them you took me Applebee’s.”
“Whatever, whore.”
“If you meant to say IG Baddie, thanks.”
“Who’d want to fuck three inches of pancake batter anyway?”
“You did, apparently.”
“Nah, that’s why God invented doggy style.”
“Or maybe it’s so even tiny dicks have a chance of getting in.”
“No, but seriously. Why do you wear so much makeup.”
“Because I want to.”
“I bet you’re pretty without it.”
“I bet you’re ugly no matter what I wear.”
“That’s kind of profound.”
“Thanks. Order me another IPA.”
“Okay.”
“We’re still not fucking.”
“I agree one hundred percent.”
She’s not an IG Baddie. She’s just a woman who wants to eat, crap, screw, and sleep. He’s not an incel. He’s just a guy who wants to dine, shit, fuck, and take a nap. But the lingo is easier to deal with than a supercomplex, ever-changing, often chaotic amalgam of emotions, attitudes, and ethics.
You use words to say what you’re going to say, and then you use words to say what you said. And usually what you’re going to say is that what you said is not what you were going to say (and then you say what you’re going to say is that what you were going to say is not what you were going to say you said).
That’s hard to keep track of, so lingo. Jargon. Not just words, but words with fuzzy connotations built in so you can connect them up with any context you feel like. Metaphors, inverted. A TikTok Thot sits at home, sipping whiskey, watching the local news on TV. She’s in PJs, in a robe, she’s just had a shower, she spent the day reffing youth soccer. The news is over, she picks up her phone, goes to her bedroom, her dresser, picks out a fun two-piece she got last time she was in Cabo.
You know the rest. Why? Lingo.
That’s character development, right there. I said TikTok Thot, and then I added all kinds of artifacts. Whiskey, the news, PJs and a robe. If I hadn’t used lingo, you would need to know what kind of whiskey, what was on the news. Instead of building the girl detail by detail, I carved away at the lingo, detail by detail.
And that’s me writing, but we do it all the time, in real-life, in real-time. We use lingo to cast the characters, stock the scene with props, and develop the script.
A guy who loves playing Super Smash Brothers picks up a controller and gives it to the nurse assigned to monitor his vital signs. Wait, wait, what’s the significance of Super Smash Brothers, are we to understand a theme of violence, or a theme of violence as entertainment? Why is it a controller, is control going to be a theme? Why is a nurse monitoring him? Are we supposed to draw a connection between his video-game character’s “hit points” and his own “vital signs”?
That’s too much to think about after just one sentence, and to keep track of when the next sentence recontextualizes all of that stuff. Even for the guy, who likes Super Smash Brothers because he’s good at it. And for the nurse, who has been secretly practicing SSB just for this day.
A gamer grabs a joycon and hands it to his caregiver. She proceeds to whip his ass.
Lingo. Now we can point out that the game was a melee game. That the kid’s on life-support. That the nurse forgot about the monitoring screen. This could have happened: while they were playing, one of the alarms went off. She could have let the kid die! No, he didn’t die, but he almost could have died. Well, no, that alarm goes off all the time. The nurse knows, without even thinking about it, when it matters and when it doesn’t. If the kid had really could have been dying, the nurse would have been able to tell, even as she was concentrating on executing a sweet combo.
It’s a joke that no one gets. The game and the caregiver had a shared experience that existed entirely devoid of the bits and pieces that define them as people and define their relationship. An alarm went off and it didn’t matter (he was fine; stupid machine) and it also didn’t matter (no one was paying attention).
By using lingo, we can ignore the “could’ves.” I’m explaining all of this via fictional examples, but this is real life too. There’s a real human being having an ironic interaction with another real human being. But they don’t think of themselves as a collection of their individual traits. They think of themselves in easy-to-think-about words, special words.
Lingo, jargon, argot. Slang, if you want. This is why you’re not allowed to use the N word.