KYM Review: The Slang Of 2022

Internet language continued its heavenly ascension towards pure transcendence in 2022, as tweeters and posters worked to create new, astounding combinations of letters and words that are pure gobbledygook to readers of outdated mediums like “books,” yet are completely comprehensible to the noble online populace.

In yet another bewildering year, many slang terms rose to prominence before being quickly ushered out by new words, all seemingly requiring knowledge of dense lore to fully comprehend their true definition.

One need look no further than the Oxford English Dictionary naming “Goblin Mode” its word of the year, yet still not putting forth a definition that satisfied what it meant to the many among us who went “Goblin Mode” in 2022.

Of course, at the rate language is currently accelerating, our list of the 10 top slang terms of 2022 could very well be outdated the moment it’s published, and in a week everyone will be saying “Globabano” and “Pork Bussy” or whatever. Still, it’s important to give the slang of the year its time to shine.

Quirked Up White Boy Goated With The Sauce

“Quirked Up White Boy Goated With The Sauce” is poetry.

It’s an astounding collection of words with little connection to each other upon first glance, yet they conjure an image so specific that its definition is crystal clear — that of a nerdy white boy who is seemingly a social outcast but has an incredible talent in an unexpected area.

If you’ve ever seen a viral video where a white boy with glasses enters a dance-off and wows the crowd with his proficiency in break dancing, that’s who we’re talking about.

The phrase, once a one-off gag by Twitter user @minga__, came to prominence in 2022 thanks to a disproportionate amount of what the internet deemed sickly, skinny white guys (such as Machine Gun Kelly and Pete Davidson) ending up with some of the most beautiful women in the world (such as Megan Fox and Kim Kardashian). Convinced that these men’s looks weren’t their most attractive quality, the internet agreed that they must have “the sauce,” an ineffable magnetism that somehow netted them relationships with some of the world’s most courted women.

Would that were us, fellow sickly, skinny white boys of the world. But while we may never be the Earth’s Gigachads, there is hope that we one day could be goated (“goated” meaning to be so incredible one could jokingly claim they’re the “greatest of all time”) with the sauce.

Got That Dog In Him

Great strides in athlete evaluation were made in 2022, as many commenters eschewed Moneyball-esque data analysis when viewing sports players and instead asked a simple question, “Does he or she got that dog in them?"

It’s a simple question that seems to answer so much about how we operate in the world. To “have that dog in you” is to come through in the clutch, to step up when the chips are down, to do something extraordinary when the dogless among us would crumble.

Around the time of the NFL draft and college basketball’s March Madness tournament, armchair scouts looked at the young talent on their television screens and jokingly evaluated whether the players had “that dog in him.”

The virality of the slang phrase was aided by a photoshopped image of a literal dog in a chest X-ray, a way for sports goofers to definitively “prove” the dog, or lack thereof, in an athlete.

Now that we know how to best evaluate sports players, it really makes owning baseball cards and tracking statistics seem obsolete, huh?

Blorbo From My Shows

Tumblr had a surprising bounce back into the meme game in 2022 thanks to [gestures broadly in Twitter’s direction], and while few will argue that the biggest Tumblr meme of the year was Goncharov, the website showed again how its insular ecosystem can produce some truly wild slang.

In the same way the site has glomped on to phrases like "Poor Little Meow Meow" and "Dobby Pussy Indulgence," arguably its biggest contribution to English this year was “Blorbo From My Shows.”

Blorbo From My Shows can be compared to “Glup Shitto” in that they both refer to a phony character from media properties, but whereas Glup Shitto has developed into a way to mock media fans who are more into easter eggs than narrative, Blorbo From My Shows is about as friendly as it sounds.

The site generally defines Blorbo as a comfort character, someone you watch, root for and probably get too emotionally invested in. This led to a flurry of memes where Tumblr once again celebrated that it gave complete gobbledygook a clear definition, and users proudly held up their Blorbos in the first half of 2022.

Morb

There’s a lot to say about the Morbius phenomenon (and we certainly will say more as our year-end editorials continue), but for the purposes of this list, it would be listmaking malpractice to not discuss how Morb changed how humans spoke for much of 2022.

From “Morb” to “Morbin Time” to “Morbed” to “Morbius Sweep,” the very idea of Morbius shook up pop culture in a way that marketing execs dream of.

“Morb” itself proved a hypnotic, malleable word, and the fact it was tied to one of the biggest cinematic turds ever produced gave saying “Morb” a similar comedic feel as quoting The Room. Unfortunately for DC and Morbius, there was simply no way to save this turd, as critics and “fans” knew the film was so bad that DC’s attempt to capitalize on the Morb craze by releasing the film a second time flopped. “Morb” was everywhere in 2022, just not in people’s eyeballs.

Unalive / Algospeak

With the almighty algorithm a constant threat to take away teens’ “livelihoods” (getting likes and follows on social media) should they use words it deems "Not Safe For 8-Year-Olds," posters across the internet employed creative measures to skirt the eye of the panopticon (mods).

While “algospeak” introduced some particularly clever dirty-word workarounds like “ouid” (weed) and “leg booty” (LGBTQ community), perhaps the premiere example of algospeak is “unalive,” which means “kill.”

Anyone who’s ever been online for five minutes has seen “kill” used in a variety of hyperbolic and ultimately innocuous ways, like “if i don’t get a new Hollow Knight: Silksong trailer I’m going to kill myself.” Unfortunately, there are also many instances when “kill” is used more threateningly, so social media platforms have understandably tracked and cracked down on the word’s usage.

Thus, to express the same sentiment, posters have turned to “unalive,” which frankly makes for much funnier posts. “Stepped on a lego, gonna unalive myself” both conveys the exaggerated tone of what the “original” would have read, and “unalive” is just a subjectively funnier word than “kill.”

My Brother In Christ

“My Brother In Christ” was destined to be overplayed the moment it hit the internet. The exasperation it expresses works for many situations and it gives a new, linguistic twist to terms like “Bruh” (or, let’s be real, the N-word) that would normally be used in its place.

The term came from an edited meme that expressed “Dudes be like 'Subway sucks’. My Brother In Christ, you literally made the sandwich.” From there, it became a fun way for people to say “I’ll be level with you,” usually before dropping a hard dis on the subject at hand.

While it undeniably caught fire in the middle of 2022, it was quickly beaten to death with overuse, culminating in a Bachelor in Paradise segment in which season villain Kate repeated “My sister in Christ” to anyone who would listen to her complain about her beau, Logan.

Goofy Ahh

Zoomers said a lot of nonsense this year, to the point where, frankly, we could make a separate top 10 just for popular Zoomer slang terms of 2022. Considering that I, a Millennial, would hate doing that, we’ll just focus on one particularly bizarre and prominent term that sprung up from the generation this year: “Goofy Ahh.”

“Goofy Ahh” means “Goofy-ass,” but how the two Ss became Hs is a mystery scholars beyond our pay grade will have to suss out.

Whatever the case may be, “Goofy Ahh” became a catch-all term in 2022 for anything corny, cheesy or stupidly whimsical, meaning “Goofy Ahh” soon became synonymous with the “Weird Side of TikTok,” where anything from Chinese movie recaps to pictures of dogs with googly eyes on their butts got paired with what was naturally described as the “Goofy Ahh” sound.

L + Ratio

The bad posters of Twitter have endured “L.” They’ve endured “Ratio.” But in 2022, they became the answer to the world’s deadliest mathematical equation in “L + Ratio + You Fell Off + No Bitches,” etc., etc.

The trend of fusing all of the internet’s dismissive replies into one massive burn started cropping up towards the end of 2021, but 2022 saw the format reach extreme lengths, literally.

The number of words in an “L + Ratio” tweet sometimes reached numbers approaching the dozens, as people flexed their creative burns to cram as much as they could into 280 characters. Oftentimes, these replies were longer and likely took more time to craft than the offending tweet itself, but there’s simply no joy on Twitter sweeter than a solid ratio.

Cope Cages

In 2022, the Ukraine-Russia conflict oscillated between terrifying and memetic, as Russia’s apparent ineptitude in invading the country led to much mirth from Ukrainian sympathizers. Mirth then led to memes, and there’s been a deluge of posters, particularly in the NAFO division of Twitter, tackling Russia with brutal copypastas and Doges.

One particular “2022” meme that sprung out of the conflict is “Cope Cages,” a term used to describe the armor placed on Russian tanks to protect against Ukraine’s Javelin ATGM weapon (though its actually intended for RPGs).

The armor didn’t make for great optics (or actual armor), for as Russia continued to blunder its way through its invasion, its soldiers were literally behind bars like traveling zoo animals. Combining “Copium,” a now-perennial internet-favorite word to dunk on political opponents, and “Wage Cage,” “Cope Cage” proved a biting way to mock the Russian invasion.

Goblin Mode

Few remember the beginning of “Goblin Mode,” a term that went from barely used to the apparent Word of the Year, as judged by the Oxford English Dictionary. While the phrase had appeared prior to 2022 as a way for people to say they were acting slovenly or that their animals were being mischievous, the ascension of “Goblin Mode” started at a 2021 tweet by @housesitter_, who mentioned a time when a girl referred to being on top during sex as “going Goblin Mode.”

The tweet was bewildering and its definition of “Goblin Mode” was hardly what would become more commonly used in later months, but it introduced the term to many, where it seemed to stick like a pop music earworm.

Soon, Goblin Mode discourse accelerated towards a parody headline by Twitter rascal @JUNIPER, who crafted a fake article in which socialite Julia Fox said then-boyfriend Kanye West didn’t like it when she went “Goblin Mode.”

The tweet fooled enough readers that soon dozens of websites had to throw up definitions of Goblin Mode and corrections of @JUNIPER’s fake headline, which gave Goblin Mode a much longer shelf-life than other slang terms of 2022 and likely led to it being named Word of the Year by the OED.

In December, Oxford wrote that the term means “a type of behaviour which is unapologetically self-indulgent, lazy, slovenly, or greedy, typically in a way that rejects social norms or expectations.” In response, one Twitter user noted they go “Goblin Mode” when they wear three jumpers and eat salami under a blanket.

Is this “self-indulgent,” “slovenly” behavior that “rejects social norms or expectations?” Certainly, but in the literal dictionary’s rigorous quest to make the term as clear as possible, one could argue they overshadowed the fact that Goblin Mode is simply more of a vibe.

Looking for more of this year's best viral phenomena and memes? Be sure to check out our other 2022 meme roundups below:

• The Top 10 Memes Of 2022
• KYM Staff Picks Of 2022
• The Slang of 2022
• Breakthrough Meme Formats Of 2022
• The Year Of AI Generators
• Top Gaming Memes Of 2022
• Wildest Stories Of 2022
• Top Streamer Moments Of 2022
• Top TikToks Of 2022
• Top Lewd Memes Of 2022
• Trolls, Rumors and Hoaxes Of 2022
• Top Exploitables Of 2022
• Top Meme Creators Of 2022
• Top Meme Revivals Of 2022