debunk this if youre a linguist or something with a phd in a related field
2 posts omitted.im crying bruh wtf does cereal experiments lain skibidi toilets and walter white have to do with this.
A linguist wouldn’t “debunk” it because it’s not making a falsifiable claim. It’s a sociolinguistic observation, exaggerated as a meme.
What a linguist would say, precisely:
Correct: Language change and slang spread are mostly bottom-up, driven by frequency, convenience, and social alignment. Sentence-final though/tho fits English pragmatics well, so it diffused naturally.
Correct: Contrarian engineering of language (“let’s use X just to not be normies”) almost always fails. Deliberate prescription without a speech community doesn’t propagate.
Misleading: Albeit didn’t “fail” because it was forced—it already has a fixed syntactic niche (formal concessive adverb). It was never competing for the same slot as sentence-final though.
Missing nuance: Power, prestige groups, platforms, and repetition matter more than “organic vs forced” vibes. Some “forced” changes succeed when institutions back them.
So the academic verdict:
The meme is directionally right, theoretically sloppy, and rhetorically correct.
No PhD needed to see why it resonates—but a PhD would strip away the moralizing and say: utility + distribution > intention.
thoughbeit
>>739416You have to be a cunning linguist to debunk that