You Know It When You See It Quote
What Is 'Cheugy'? You Know It When Y'all Encounter It.
Out of affect? Basic? A new term to describe a certain artful is gaining popularity on TikTok.
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"OK TikTok, I have a new word for yous that my friends and I utilise that y'all conspicuously are all in need of," Hallie Cain, 24, a copywriter in Los Angeles, says in a TikTok posted on March 30.
In the video, she gestures to another video of a daughter who is describing "the blazon of people who go married at 20 years old" or have millennial "girlboss energy" and who wonders: What do we phone call this kind of person?
"I keep seeing videos like this," Ms. Cain says in her TikTok. "The word, my friend, is 'cheugy.'"
It'southward not quite "bones," which tin can draw someone who is a conformist or perhaps generic in their tastes, and it'south non quite "uncool." It'due south not embarrassing or even e'er negative. Cheugy (pronounced chew-gee) can be used, broadly, to draw someone who is out of date or trying as well hard. And while a lot of cheugy things are associated with millennial women, the term can be applied to anyone of whatsoever gender and any historic period.
Information technology's not just a fashion to draw people. According to people who have embraced the word, the following are also cheugy: The Hype Business firm, Aureate Goose sneakers, annihilation associated with Barstool Sports, Gucci belts with the large double "Yard" logo, being really into sneaker civilization, Rae Dunn pottery, and anything chevron.
"One of my friends said lasagna is cheugy," said Ms. Cain.
Things that are decidedly un-cheugy, according to its progenitors: thrifting, making your own clothes, handmade products, Levi's jeans, Birkenstocks, habitation decor not institute at Target. "Looking expert for yourself and non caring what other people think, that conviction exudes non-cheugyness," said Gaby Rasson, 23, a software developer in Los Angeles who coined the term.
She said she started using the give-and-take back in 2013 while attending Beverly Hills High Schoolhouse. She wanted a fashion to describe people who were slightly off trend. Merely she couldn't quite come upwardly with the right term, so she created her own.
"Information technology was a category that didn't exist," she said. "There was a missing word that was on the edge of my tongue and zippo to describe information technology and 'cheugy' came to me. How information technology sounded fit the meaning."
The discussion spread among her classmates, then camp friends, then, when her friends went off to higher, it took off on their campuses. "Anybody in our sorority knows the word cheugy," said Abby Siegel, 23, a producer and erstwhile pupil at the Academy of Colorado, Boulder, who said she learned the phrase at a summertime army camp that Ms. Rasson likewise attended.
But cheugy was in no fashion mainstream until Ms. Cain posted her TikTok. It quickly clustered hundreds of thousands of views, inspiring explainers.
Though cheugy has slight negative connotations, people who use the term said they oftentimes identify as cheugy themselves. "Everyone can exist cheugy," said Ms. Siegel. "Anybody has something cheugy in their cupboard. We didn't intend for information technology to be a mean thing. Some people have claimed that information technology is. Information technology's merely a fun word nosotros used as a group of friends that somehow resonated with a agglomeration of people."
The women also don't claim to be the arbiters of the term. "It's also totally open up to your interpretation," said Ms. Cain. "I'll send something to our group chat and be similar, 'Is this cheugy?' and some volition say 'aye' and some will say 'no.'"
Michael Cotos, 24, an actor in Los Angeles, discovered the word on TikTok and it immediately resonated as a niche descriptor. "I was like OMG, this is the perfect word," he said. "It is a certain sub grouping of people that just don't quite get information technology."
Alex Lugger, 32, a boat marketer in Springfield, Mo., said that she cocky identifies equally a bit cheugy. (She likewise learned about the word through TikTok.) "We were bones in our 20s and now nosotros're cheugy in our 30s," she said.
Cheugy is just the latest in a long line of niche identifiers that have gained traction on the cyberspace, where people relentlessly categorize highly specific archetypes in starter pack memes and videos. It'due south no coincidence that cheugy gained traction on TikTok, a platform that has functioned as an escape from Instagram's in one case dominant aesthetic, which is the pinnacle of cheugy.
Kelly Wright, an experimental sociolinguist and Ph.D. candidate at the University of Michigan who studies language, said that with the rise of social media, "we see words emerging to ascertain very niche categories of people, identities and behaviors. In their core, they're marking shared events or a shared understanding of the world. These words that sally from smaller communities have the potential to exist picked up by wider audiences considering of social media and that connectedness."
Ultimately words similar cheugy are equally much about establishing who you aren't every bit who you are. "A word like cheugy is a way of labeling an in grouping and an out group," said Gretchen McCulloch, a linguist and the author of "Considering Net," a book about how the cyberspace has shaped language.
She said that though the notion of cheugy has probably been around for a while, the term itself is new and novel enough to be trendy itself. "Sure types of words get through trends just like clothing and accessories practise," Ms. McCulloch said. "They're fashionable for a while and go out of fashion. The word for absurd gets replaced every few years, cool sticks around as a background discussion. Slap-up meant cool, now information technology's dated. Coming upwardly with a word like cheugy is a way to distance yourself from something that used to be really popular until very recently."
Every bit such, what is and isn't cheugy is highly subjective and changing quickly. "It'due south really easy to identify cheugy things on TikTok because TikTok is then fast paced and in that location'south and then many trends that come and go," said Ms. Siegel.
"I see stuff and I'm like, this is then overdone then I remember information technology's cheugy. Whereas if I didn't run across information technology on my 'For Yous' page, I wouldn't think it was cheugy," she said, referring to what is essentially the TikTok domicile page.
And for any millennials worried most being behind the trends, Ms. Cain said not to worry. "I think millennials have noticed that some things nosotros used to consider cheugy are coming dorsum in mode and aren't cheugy anymore," she said. "When I was first introduced to the give-and-take in 2015, low rise jeans were cheugy. Now, half-dozen years later, low rise jeans are back in fashion and I don't think they're cheugy anymore."
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/29/style/cheugy.html
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