Fam, Take A Look At My Merch

Popular culture, it’s a wonderful thing.

Sometimes.

The trend for shortening perfectly acceptable words is annoying though isn’t it?

“Celebs” selling their “merch” is one of them. I mean what’s wrong with saying celebrities and merchandise?

We can’t, we aren’t allowed. If you want to be fashionable then you’ve got to follow the rules and that means knocking off some vowels and consonants so that the word sounds better. Social media loves it because it streamlines the language and robs ok boomers of their integrity.

Incredibly, some words lose all their letters bar one such as “p” which is short for “pretty” as in, “I’m p excited to go to the staff meeting later.”

In school, this matters and SLT and the rest of us have got to alter our ways.

Collaboration is important in schools and we are always being told that we’ve got to work together as one family. Except, we can’t say collaboration or family now, it’s got to be “collab” and “fam”.

We of course see all this played out in real life in children’s language, spoken and written and so what do we do?

Do we offer our sincere fauxpologies at not wanting to upset and correct the use of “merch”, “well jel”, “sus” etc or do we step in and assertively demand “merchandise”, “jealous” and “suspicious”?

TBH, the thing is, I don’t want to buy merch, I want to buy merchandise and I think the extra effort pronouncing the whole word is worth it. I also don’t care if you are jealous.

All this is of course totes annoying and this is where Myers (2017) gets it spot:

“Here lies the body, but not the soul, of “totally”, bastardised beyond recognition from a gorgeous, absolute adverb into an uber-chilled shrug or nod of the head. Not only that, it has a tendency to take other words down with it. “Totes emosh”, “totes cray”: no syllable is safe.”

Apparently ok boomer merch is selling really well and that’s totes frightening and I’m afraid.

I can’t even say “OMG or LOL” anymore because that is so yesterday, just like the phrase “so yesterday”. I thought I was on point but far from it. My children remind me that I am “Hundo P” (100%) not the “GOAT” (greatest of all time) and never will be.

Time to get the Xmas decs out.