We all love an abbreviashe 🧃
+ The first 🏀Slam Dunc🏀 of the year & a new episode of The Shit Show!!
Angels! We did it! Week one back on earth (work) done & it feels so good. Maybe you’ve been reading this week’s edish’s from the comfort of your home as you take an extended break? Maybe you were back in the office using this as your lil 9am treat with your coffee to ease you into the day? However you consume this thing I’m glad you do (and why do none of you sent me pics of how you read it anymore?? More of that plz!!) And never fear, if you REALLY HATE the two days without this newsy, we can do you one better, with Bel’s Saturday edish were you will get ABSOLUTELY NO NEWS!! What you will get are all the gorg things you want to read/ feel/ think about on a Saturday morning instead. This baddie goes out to all our paying supporters, and it feels like a giant hug. You’re gonna love it.
❤️Help us heal ur heart!! 💔
🏀 Slam Dunc: Gen X is the invisible generation, and it’s a GIFT🏀
Maybe I’m British?
New episode of The Shit Show!
❤️Help us heal ur heart!! 💔
This project is brought to you by Love Better!! We’re helping young people break up better 💌
We’re working on a spesh new project with Vice & Love Better all about ✨heartbreak.✨ We wanna help young people break up in healthier, and more positive ways (bc no one ever taught us how to deal with this shit). To do this, we need real peeps, going through real hurt.
Going through a break up? Got a story?
Are you 18-24 and living in New Zealand?
If the answer is yes, yes, yes, hit this link to get involved.
New episode of The Shit Show!
Hell yeah!! Squish and I are back on the mics to bring you up to date on:
What happened when protesters stormed the Brazilian congress
Andrew Tate
A new vaccine for honeybees
The latest shooting in America
What actually went down with the Speaker vote
+ our usual bants
So you should listen!!!
🏀 Slam Dunc: Gen X is the invisible generation, and it’s a GIFT🏀
This section is written by Dunc: my bestie, my mentor, a huge basketball fan (and DJ on the odd occasion.) Dunc has pretty hot takes on most things, and he’s also the founder of The Spinoff & host of The Fold, so when you’ve finished reading this, there’s plenty more of him out there for you xxx
So Lucy got me this personalised mug for my birthday which I truly love. It has objectively the best tweet of the past five years on it, along with a comment from a SYSCA fan named Anjali. It reads “DUNC IS GEN X?! OR WAS THAT A TYPO?” And honestly, lovely compliment… I think? (I am Gen X, btw.)
There’s an “act your age” school of societal thought which is says that I should probably be ashamed of being really interested in and a fan of heaps of culture which is not meant for me. But I find the idea that people’s taste freezes solid in their late teens / early 20s really bleak – it happens for complex reasons but I think it’s a force we should resist if we can. Basically it seems like we now live in a world where there are wāhine in their 70s who are hardcore Twitch streamers and I’m into that.
The other thing I like about the comment on the mug is that it made me realise what a huge privilege it is to be Gen X. We were talked about heaps in the 90s, in a similar way to Gen Z’s are now – we were post-grunge, slackers, didn’t believe in capitalism or supermarkets, that kind of thing. But subsequently we have basically vanished from the chat in a really profound way. Google Trends shows almost triple the average interest in Boomer over Gen X, and around double for both Gen Z and Millennial. It’s the way it feels in the culture – Gen X’s are somehow invisible, neither taking the blame for everything like Boomers, nor the focus of profound wonder and disgust, like Millennials and Gen Zs. Maybe it should be galling to be basically the new silent generation (the older people who birthed the Boomers and did all the big wars etc), but truly, to be invisible in the discourse feels like a profound gift and I am thrilled to have received it.
Til next time!!
Why do British people love to abbreviate things? An investy g
A few days ago one of you sent me this tweet (I can’t remember who GAH!)
And now there has been a full-on investigashe about how British people like to abbreviate things (I fumbled this scoop - this should have been MY investigashe.)
The piece is basically about how one of the things British people do particularly well is abbreviating things, and honestly - maybe I’m British?? Bc if there’s one very imp thing about me, it’s that it’s essench that if a word can be shortened, it is. (Except I will never use ‘tis - that abberv gives me the ick for some reason.) Here’s a lil snippet:
It never takes long for someone to come up with a catchy, silly abbreviation for any given phrase. The term ‘panny d’ is used in this GQ article from April 2020, less than a month after the UK entered its first lockdown – sorry, I mean ‘locky d’. Last summer we celebrated the ‘platty joobs’ (coined by Stath Lets Flats actor Kiell Smith-Bynoe), followed by the ‘statey funes’ in September. Most recently, a Depop Drama post went viral after a buyer submitted a screenshot of a seller referring to the cost of living crisis as the ‘cozzie livs’.
And I did like this theory about how we shorten words to make them less threating, or to take ownership of them, OR to help us feel part of certain scenes:
“People elaborate, alter or abbreviate words in order to make them less cumbersome, alien or threatening, to make them more familiar and to add a reassuring element of humour,” he explains. “All of this enables people to take ‘ownership’ of words – for fun, to express their identity (knowing the latest slang formulations makes you an insider rather than being left behind) or to try to exert some control over otherwise overwhelming influences.”
I know what you’re all thinking - this isn’t just a British thing! We all abbreviate words! And to that, I will just leave you with this:
Unforch I’m hungover, so my endeavour to write about a few more news stories for you has fallen VERY short
But here are the other things I would have written about todays if I wasn’t… like this:
Love you!!! See you for the first edish of Bel’s newsy tomorrow morning!
Prince Harry’s Spare is a sad and self-indicting portrait of royalty on the brink (Vox)
Trying to Live a Day Without Plastic (The NY Times)
 | A guest post by
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my best friend from uni abbreviates so chronically that she’ll lit shorten kfc to kf💀💀
My question would be about the shortening of all NAMES? I absolutely adore it, and have no idea why it's way less common in the U.S. We tend to use those as nicknames that are reserved for people really close to you. I've never given it much thought beyond that so maybe I need to start an investigashe! 😜