When Did Yikes Become Popular Again
While browsing the net, y'all will certainly come across "yikes". This picayune give-and-take made of just five letters is practically everywhere. At a certain point everybody started to utilize it, regardless of their age, gender or political vision. "Yikes" is loved as much by Gen Z activists every bit by former, bourgeois politicians: information technology is a concept that cuts beyond club, from high school classrooms to government departments. This is indeed extremely fascinating but… what does this word mean? And where did it come from?
Meaning
Let'south start with the basics. "Yikes" is an interjection, "a word or phrase with no particular grammatical relation to a sentence, oft used to express an emotion". Therefore, "yikes" belongs to the same category of words as "alas", used to limited sorrow, regret, compassion, grief; or "ehm", employed when i has to express perplexity. At this bespeak the question is: when and how "yikes" has to be used? What types of emotions does it help us to express?
According to Cambridge Lexicon, you lot should use "yikes" when you are "worried, surprised or shocked". For Merriam-Webster, the interjection indicates "fright or astonishment". The Online Slang Dictionary, focused on American English and urban slang, declares that yikes is employed to express surprise, especially for "shocking, weird or uncouth surprise"; it also adds that "yikes" is to a higher place all used as "an exclamation elders tend to use around children instead of 'crap' or 'damn'". Finally, Urbandictionary, thanks to its typical non too subtle irony, goes straight to the bespeak and defines "yikes" equally "a reaction to everything".
Currently, on Ludwig, there are lx attestation for "yikes". For fairly obvious reasons, the term never appears in scientific journals or encyclopaedias. Rather, "yikes" is mainly used by newspapers, such as The New York Times, The Guardian or The New Yorker, and if we analyse the context in which the term is employed, we can hands define that, in most cases, it occurs in interviews, a literary genre which is more prone to testify the actual language in apply, or in manufactures focused on infamous celebrities tweets that caused scandal (this should be established equally a literary genre also). In other words, within this kind of source, "yikes" is mainly used when a journalist has to transcribe the words spoken by a sure person. Hither you are some examples:
She added: "Yikes, I am being reported to Channel 4 and the BBC. In a moment I volition be forced to read the Labour manifesto and subscribe to the Guardian."
Source: "Katie Hopkins apologises for timing of tweet about Scottish life expectancy". The Guardian, 2014.
Someone asked me, "What side of the bed does the president slumber on?" I'm like, Yikes, I don't know if I know that.
Source: "Obama's First Term: A Romantic Oral History". The New York Times Magazine, 2013.
Lora Hooper, an associate professor of immunology and microbiology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Centre, who follows the Paleo diet, heavy on meat, exclaimed, "Yikes!" The study does not mean that red meat is entirely bad or that it is all-time to avoid it entirely, said Dr. Hazen, the pb researcher.
Source: "Culprit in Heart Affliction Goes Beyond Meat's Fat". The New York Times. 2013.
On the other mitt, information technology should also be noted that in more contempo times, "yikes" has begun to exist employed also in editorial pieces aimed at narrating moments of everyday life. For instance, in a captivating article written by Emily Bit, her personal experience of giving birth is described in the post-obit fashion:
· "The baby was coming face up-up. This is not nearly as worrisome as a barrel- or anxiety-first infant, nor as awful every bit that thing where their caput gets jammed to the side and they're somehow coming … neck-first? Yikes — but it does make the whole process a scrap more difficult. At that place was an atrocious lot of pushing. I moaned piteously for water ice."
Source: "Here's How It Went When I Had the Baby". The New Yorker, 2015.
Origin and History
Yikes is not a neologism recently arisen among young people. Rather, information technology is an old word, someone would say fifty-fifty ancient. Like many other interjections, it belongs more to spoken language than to official written documents, so it is hard to trace its history. Most probable, it derives from "yoicks", an assertion employed by hunters during the 18th century to encourage dogs to chase their (poor) casualty, and afterward employed as an interjection to limited excitement.
According to Google Books Ngram Viewer, the first sporadic written attestations of "yikes" would date back to the eye of the 19th century. Merely starting from the '80s of the 20th century there is an abrupt hike (not yikes) in popularity. Information technology's not a surprise tha Mashable has even declared "yikes" the most popular word of 2019.
In this regard, it is definitely noteworthy a vintage advertisement about a pencil brand called "Yikes", that evidently had the power of transforming you into the libation version of yourself:
As shown by Google Trends, the word has reached a tiptop in popularity between 2022 and 2021, probably thanks to social media, whose users are more inclined in employing the typical words of the everyday linguistic communication.
It must also be highlighted that the release of the unmarried "Yikes", by the famous rapper Nicky Minaj, occurred in February 2022 (see that spike on the graph), may have had a office in further increasing the searches for the term on Google. It wouldn't be the starting time time a song or a flick have contributed to brand an expression popular.
Ludwig'south wrap-up
Experience complimentary to use "yikes" when you are chatting with your friends or for your tweets. It is also OK to use it when you are writing about existent life stories: if used well, "yikes" can indeed add realism to your piece. You lot can employ it as much equally y'all similar if you are Nicki Minaj only, unless you are a linguist working on the word "yikes" itself, I strongly advise you not to use this term in a scientific commodity. Otherwise, "yikes!" volition be the first word y'all will say, once you go the reviews of your piece of work!
Source: https://ludwig.guru/blog/yikes-is-a-word-older-than-you-can-guess/
0 Response to "When Did Yikes Become Popular Again"
Post a Comment