debunk this if youre a linguist or something with a phd in a related field
THOUGH posting was the only good wojack spam on this site
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