This is where, after a long and sneaky convergence, “yoink” meets “yeet.” Not only do the verbs represent equal but polarized vectors, they are each to be spoken aloud at the moment you perform the motion. If you yeet something hard enough, you won’t see it again. It has also found a figurative utility: A depressed person will tweet “yeet me into the abyss,” while a pissed-off individual may voice a desire to “yeet into the sun.” In this way, “yeet” has become the noise of ejection and refusal. Urban Dictionary’s number one definition, “ to discard an item at high velocity,” has about six times as many upvotes as the top generalist versions. Stripped of any observable action, it’s a statement that conveys energy and hype.Īll the same, that 2014 Vine and others like it have solidified “yeet” into a particular gesture. It’s a word that can mean anything and everything, depending on context, and this surely lent it greater value to teenagers who would prefer that their idioms remain inscrutable to adults. Really, this transitive exploitation of “yeet” - as in, “to throw or hurl with great force” - is but one facet of its variable nature. There’s one where a kid’s dance moves are encouraged by peers shouting “yeet,” and, critical to this discussion, another in which a girl is given a beverage can, declares “this bitch empty,” and yeets it into a crowded school hallway. The current vogue for “yeet” is owed entirely to African-American Vernacular English, by way of a few iconic Vines.
This gets us surprisingly close to a flipside for “yoink”: Instead of gathering in, you’re projecting out, expelling, launching. But “yeten,” like the 21st century “yeet,” was an incredibly versatile word - it might just as well mean “to overflow” or “to melt or dissolve.” Among its many alternative definitions, you also have “to send forth” and “to disperse or scatter.” In the Middle English spoken in the first half of the second millennium, “yeet” was a form of the verb “yeten,” which could refer to the choice to address someone by the formal “ye” instead of the casual “thou.” It’s safe to say that this usage is extinct. “Yeet” is at once an older and newer coinage, and by far the more confounding.
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For their part, The Simpsons writers have alluded to an onomatopoeic origin in earlier cartoon franchises “yoink” is the approximate transliteration of the sound cue for sudden theft in Hanna-Barbera series like Scooby-Doo (which also includes the interjection “zoinks”), and may have figured in Archie Comics as well. On the etymological side, its resemblance to “yank” can be no accident, and indeed it might be read as a goofy distortion of that verb. “Yoink” as we know it was established earlier, and with a more specific application - it entered public consciousness through The Simpsons, whose characters routinely deploy it in the act of snatching, grabbing or stealing an item, typically right out of someone else’s hands.Īlthough its roots are mysterious, “yoink” is the plausible synthesis of two antecedents. To answer that, we’ll first need to examine “yoink” and “yeet” in relative isolation. But does all this add up to a valid proof of their inverse definitions?Ī “yeet” is nature’s evolutionary response to the “yoink” They are, in a manner of speaking, both memes. Both words carry an implied exclamation point, and neither would be immediately comprehensible to an English speaker in the mid-20th century. An economy of letters but a sharp divergence of sound. There’s a pleasing balance to the formulation. Even if you haven’t thought of it this way, you’ll note a stab of recognition at this hypothesis: “Yoink” is the opposite of “Yeet.” Pop culture and youth slang play a considerable role in generating these fluid systems of meaning, such that a couple of nonsense syllables borne out of jokes may, over time, prove to be useful and complementary terms, each one honed by the other. Language is wondrously malleable, and it never stays the same for long, but even in rapid change it rebuilds an internal, often unspoken logic. By the same token, it seems as though a term cannot come into existence without acquiring an antonym - in order to describe something, there must be an opposite quality, the shadow or reflection. All physics students learn Newton’s third law of motion: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.
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