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In Nobody Needs This, a new series for The Journal, Emer McLysaght focuses her eagle eye on the trends, products and notions we can do without. It’s not all giving out, however. She’ll also be keeping up with what’s catching her attention, keeping people interested and, quite frankly, driving her mad.
I THINK I can pinpoint the exact moment the word ‘like’ entered the Irish vocabulary as a sentence filler.
It was 1995 and the US TV show My So-Called Life was on Network 2 once a week. Fifteen-year-old Angela Chase, playing by a teenaged Claire Danes, was full of angst, hormones, hatred for her parents and lust for her schoolmate Jordan Catalano, portrayed by a young Jared Leto complete with the perfect curtain hair and baggy jean combo. My friends and I were obsessed with My So-Called Life. We dyed our hair copper like Angela and tied black shoelaces around our necks as chokers like Jordan.
One of Angela’s iconic lines from the show arose from her observations of Jordan lounging by his locker in the school hallway.
“I love the way he, like, leans”, her voiceover told the audience, and teenaged girls all over Ireland decided that they loved the way he, like, leaned too.
Thirty years on, I can relate to the annoyance that the parents and older people of nineties Ireland must have felt when My So-Called Life and the 1995 film Clueless breached our shores with the ‘like’ phenomenon. Except this time, it’s ‘bro’.
‘Bro’ has been with us for a while now. It has its roots, as so much slang does, in African American Vernacular English. It travelled into very mainstream usage in the US along with concepts like ‘bromance’ and ‘bro code’. More recently the popularity of YouTube and streaming platforms like Twitch means it has become engrained in the vocabularies of Gen Alpha iPad kids and younger Gen Z populations in Ireland. We even have our own ‘yup bro’ subculture, a combination of working-class Dublin slang and aesthetics and the appropriation of the same from UK and US culture.
In the same way that me and my teenaged peers’ enthusiastic use of ‘like’ must have singed the eardrums of those around us, the bro phenomenon almost has me praying for the sweet relief of nails of a chalkboard. However, I am even more concerned about the onward march of bro’s insidious cousin, ‘let’s go’.
I’ve been noticing and despising the use of ‘let’s go’ online and in American media for a while now. It’s typically used as punctuation at the end of a sentence or in response to a desirable outcome. If a sports team scores or good news is received it will elicit a fist pump and a ‘let’s gooooo’, or the even more annoying ‘let’s f***ing go!’, sometimes abbreviated to ‘LFG’. In 2023 Slate.com carried out a deep dive into ‘let’s go’ and noted that while its history may be traced back to World War II recruitment posters, it really has its modern roots in “dude-coded hobbies, especially gaming”. ‘Let’s go’, according to Slate, is uber-masculine, a stereotypical bro term and maybe even a little toxic.
If I drill down into my most hated use of ‘let’s go’, it’s when it’s delivered in monotone. I was watching one of those extreme trivia nerds on Instagram the other day, an otherwise incredibly impressive guy who can identify an obscure South American river just by looking at a greyscale satellite image, and each time he delivered a correct answer he responded with a muted ‘let’s goooooo’. I can’t blame the poor man. It’s just a reflex, the same way I might exclaim ‘yes!’ in a similar scenario (although, to be clear, I couldn’t name any of the rivers). It’s just that the way the phrase has quickly trickled down from an exuberant frat boy yell to a subdued, ubiquitous sentence-ender has me worried that it’s only a matter of time before I’m hearing it from the mouths of Irish babes.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that ‘let’s go’ is already with us in Ireland and I’m not sure if my misophonia is ready for it. I can accept that there’s nothing more elderly than policing the vocabulary of others, but haven’t we already endured enough with the nationwide adoption of ‘bro’? We don’t need to add ‘let’s go’ into the mix. Next things we’ll be calling Lego ‘Legos’ and that’s when the sky will start, like, falling down.
Well, he’s @solunaaaa16 and you can follow him here. He can name the country from its zoomed in flag, name the country from its rotated outline and name the football team from their logo.
While we’re here, why not see if you can name the album cover from just a snippet of the image, or try out @mahanlankarani’s countless trivia quizzes.
Emer will be back next Friday morning with more recommendations.
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