“Grand Order of Occidental Nighthawks”
Last month was the first time I found out about the new meaning of goon. I looked up goon on Wiktionary and the only slang I found (apart from Something Awful) was
(slang) One hired to legally kidnap a child and forcibly transport them to a boot camp, boarding school, wilderness therapy or a similar rehabilitation facility.
Had I looked under the gerund form, I would have found the other meaning of “to goon.”
Someone suggested the OED. I looked; it lacks the new slang but has a very old, long obsolete verb to goon as a variant of “gane,” meaning “to open the mouth wide, to gape or yawn.” Which weirdly circles around to the new slang.
I concur.
Just about.
Full text of Mark Twain’s “Some Thoughts on the Science of Onanism
Euphemisms for Male Masturbation (“gooning” isn’t included, although neither is “one off the wrist,” made familiar to Americans in the opening song of The Life of Brian)
Sorry I didn’t read the whole thread, but has this kerning game been mentioned yet?
You drag individual letters around until they look the “nicest”, compared to some subjective “optimal” level of kerning. Really shows the subtle importance of kerning and how it can affect the look and feel of a word.
Urban dictionary exists to explain youth lingo to the olds. The part where they say “well-known slang term” is to rub it in (pun absolutely intended.)
As noted upthread by an expert = not me there’s a readily computable mathematical optimal value.
I personally am not certain the math results in the subjective optimum, but that’s amatuers quibbling w experts.
Do you know which post it was? (Sorry, I read the first few pages but must’ve missed it)
There are a bunch of algorithms that can try to do this on their own (and programs like Adobe InDesign or Illustrator will often include them to try to auto-kern for you), but in my experience they don’t always work well with “decorative” fonts that have non-uniform letters and “centers of gravity” (not sure of the proper typographical term).
I’d love to read the post if you know which one it was.
Edit: There was also this paper from last year where they were trying to train machine learning to kern better: Learning to Kern — Set-wise Estimation of Optimal Letter Space
I’ve spent decades doing historical newspaper research trying to figure out how known an event or person - or a word - was to the general public in various times in history.
I’ve learned that you can’t go by how old a term was. Look at the many threads here about the origin of the term “the whole nine yards.” It now has been traced back to the 1800s, with the term used in local slang as “the whole six yards.” Why it became the whole nine yards is still unknown. It was rediscovered over and over until after WWII and gradually became familiar to most people. Nobody knows how many or what percentage or what groups.
Slang is particularly hard to trace. Until extremely recently, few written sites allowed slang, and the few that did usually were compilations of slang with no way of knowing whether they were contemporary or already dated.
The situation has almost completely reversed. Social media allows slang to be shared among tranches of users, but those are almost never truly representative of the population. They are grouped by age or sex or interest and also by what social media platforms they use. What is known to teen-age boys on Reddit is not indicative of what is known to all teen-age boys, let alone the greater population.
I’ve seen the term gooning many times, but only in posts explaining what the heck it is. By the time I’ve seen the next one I’ve forgotten about its existence since it has a life completely outside of mine. Do I count as knowing the term or not? (Hint. Nowhere in this thread have I ever stated that I didn’t know the term.)
To back up an assertion that the letters g o o n would be read by as a masturbatory term by more than a tiny segment of the population requires more than a single article pandering to that population. That requires research. None has been offered, merely more assertions.
The difference between the young and the old is that the older one gets, the more words one has been exposed to. Older readers probably are familiar with thousands of words, terms, and references that sail right over the heads of younger ones. Some of those words have aged into general usage and familiarity. Some are so time, site, or interest specific that they’ll be lost when that group dies off. Science fiction before the 60s had a tiny and much derided fanbase of interest only because they were hyperliterate and put out millions of words in fanzines. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of in-group terms were invented and easily permeated the culture because it was so small.
Today cultures are still usually small in-groups but can send terms to millions who get to decide whether to adopt them or ignore them. Urbandictionary serves a very useful purpose, much like knowyourmeme for images. Does that mean an entry there proves familiarity? Probably less than the appearance of a word in a mainstream dictionary. At least those demand a minimum set of uses over a period of time to qualify. How widespread and lasting are those ancient, like two-year-old, memes? Not much and not very is my guess.
Assertions are easy. If you want me to believe them, you need to back them up. I tried and found no there there. Maybe others can do better. I’d like to know. Seriously.
Start at post 20 & read on for the next few.
I may have overstated their case. Your comments about auto-kerning sometimes being inadequate suggests that I did so. That poster stated a hard rule. But if e.g. Adobe’s auto-kerning occasionally mucks up special cases, that suggests to me that that poster’s rule is one of thumb for the generic cases, not some mathematically provable universal optimal standard.
Ultimately, kerning is a visual art. I bet kerning in Cyrillic or Greek or Arabic or Hebrew or Traditional Chinese orthography or Japanese katakana looks and behaves differently than it does in US English.
Similar, but not identical.
Your work sounds fascinating, truly. I love slang. I never heard that usage of goon in my life until this thread, and it gives me the willies, so I’m definitely not the person who can provide you the data you seek. What I can say with confidence is that I find it entirely plausible that a lot of young people are familiar with this term and that a lot of old people aren’t. And I find it silly when a bunch of old people say, “I’ve never heard of this term young people are using, therefore it’s not common.” I mean, no longer being “with it” is a rite of passage some take more gracefully than others. I’ve never been anywhere in the neighborhood of cool. It’s like fading beauty. I don’t miss it because I never really had it. I use slang from every decade, pretty much indiscriminately. Lately I’ve been saying “rad” a lot. My husband went through an “And how!” phase. For real. I wanted to punch him.
In my experience, the only people who are really reliable indicators of what’s common with young people (besides young people) is parents of young people. My son is five and he asked me the other day about K-pop Demon Hunter. No idea. But you have to keep up with this stuff, as a parent, if you have any hope of understanding your kid. So, in the absence of hard data, I’d say look to the parents.
Well, if only a few “yutes” understand it, and not the kids, or the middle agers or the oldsters- then indeed it isnt “common”. By several meanings. Common among that particular set is one thing in common parlance is another.
But I admit- i am not hip. In fact if I touched Maynard G Krebs, there likely would be an explosion.
Okay.
(I realize that absolutely nothing will shake you from your dug-in position that any and all cities that I could produce represent a pupulation that doesn’t count.)
A brief survey of a 26 year old and a 15 year old (both males) provided valuable data that both were aware of its meaning. I’ll be seeking a government research grant before writing this up formally.
Heheh, despite your post, I didn’t even realize that “Goon” was actually “Go on” till I had read halfway through the thread. That is really some spectacularly bad kerning.
I preferred it when the common internet term for masturbation was “fap”, because who doesn’t like onomatopoeia? “Goon”, on the other hand, seems unnecessarily judgmental.
Plus “The Fappening” is a cleverish punny name. What would the goon version be?
The Extravagoonza?
The term is so common that I didn’t realize you would be unaware of the term. I mean, I saw the thread asking about 67, and that’s a much more recent coinage.
And while 67 is fading from being uncool, I don’t see “gooning” going anywhere. Not only has it stood the test of time, but it comes from the previous definition of being a mindless idiot. They’re becoming a mindless idiot for pornography, and work themselves into a mindless trance like state.
It’s a similar trajectory to the word “simp.” And that word is here to stay.
Edited to add: if you want to learn about a slang term, googling and looking at text is a bad idea. Text is the old people’s medium. Look at the images tag. Better yet, type “[word] meme” as your search.
And, yeah, the OP’s thing is really bad. It’s as bad as the obviously photoshopped memes I’ve seen.
You don’t even have to know the meaning of “goon” to not be able to tell it’s supposed to be “go on.”
And I always liked the xkcd comic. It’s not about seeing different words. It’s literally about what is described. It took me forever to stop being annoyed by bad kerning once I learned about it in my graphic design classes.