McCulloch — “Still, it’s tempting to mislabel the many words…”

Source: Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language — Gretchen McCulloch

Book page: mcculloch-because-internet-part-1

From: Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language — Quotes

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Still, it’s tempting to mislabel the many words currently being appropriated into general American pop culture from African American English as “social media words” simply because they’re used by young people, and young people are on social media, without giving due credit to the words’ true origins. Fittingly, the internet has come up with a word for this: columbusing, or white people claiming to discover something that was already well established in another community, by analogy with how Columbus gets credit for discovering America despite the millions of people who already lived there.