Some of the younger people in my family use the word salty instead of bitter to describe someone who is feeling bitter. I thought this was something unique to these particular family members until I read an article this morning in which Dallas Cowboys running back Ezekiel Elliot uses salty in the same way to describe an opposing player.
Is this something new that millennials are doing? Have any of you all heard anyone using salty instead of bitter to describe someone who is still upset about something that happened a long time ago?
I would say “salty” is meant to be dismissive. Implying that someone is only acting a certain way because they’re mad about losing (i.e. not being good enough).
Really? These two words may describe taste (but not the same taste). But the usage described here is as a description of one’s attitude. In my experience “bitter” refers to one’s feelings toward an event (e.g. toward a loss in a football game) while “salty” refers to one’s demeanor toward something (e.g. using coarse or rude language to describe it).
If there’s a subset of young people using the word in a new way it may or may not catch on, but if there’s an extended transition to a new usage it’s going to cause some confusion. To me “salty” tends not to be a particularly deprecatory word for something very different from what is deprecated as “bitter”, just as the flavours on the tongue are so different.
Urban Dictionary and Know Your Meme seem to support that usage, but I can’t see it in Merriam-Webster or American Heritage Dictionary.
KYM says: ““Salty” is a slang term meaning “upset” or “bitter” typically used as an insult in player-vs.-player (PvP) games to suggest that the opponent feels mad or frustrated due to pwnage. Origin
According to the Online Etymology Dictionary,[4] the U.S. slang sense of *salty *meaning angry or irritated was first attested in 1938. On April 24th, 2007, an entry on the term[3] was submitted to Urban Dictionary. The author describes it as having originated in Philadelphia, where it was defined as “looking stupid… because of something you did”. It is thought to have entered into widespread usage on the internet through fighting game and multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) communities.[1]”
I also see “salty” and “bitter” being used differently.
Bitter is a feeling, salty is what the person is doing or saying because of feeling bitter (or angry, or confrontational, or whatever)
“Kim and Lee are playing CAH, and Kim knows the crowd better than Lee, so Kim’s dirty cards usually win, with Lee a close second. As the game goes on, Lee gets bitter about being constantly in second place, and she starts throwing down some seriously salty cards.”
People were using it when I was in high school (94-98) for basically the same meaning. More or less to mean that someone was mad or angry. Now that I think about it, it’s usually used in the third person. People don’t usually say “I’m salty” it was usually “I don’t know what you said to her, but she’s salty” or “she’s salty, you better go deal with that”.
Either way, it’s hardly new, I’ve been hearing it a bit more in the past year or so (I work with a lot of HS kids if that makes a difference), but it was an extremely common word 15-20 years ago.
Anecdotal, but online I’ve seen it most often in younger black communities, especially ones focused on music, sports, and celebrity gossip. Historically they seem to produce a lot of slang which is later overused and eventually killed by white people trying to act cool, so I assumed this one would have a similar trajectory as “ratchet,” “throwing shade,” or “bae.”
In the online game I play, “salty” pretty much exclusively refers to people complaining about or insulting the player that they’re busy losing to. People will screenshot the chat logs and share them and laugh at the poor losers. Extra internet points if you play politely dumb and get them to really dig in.
I know a person who will say “I’m feeling a little salty about X, Y and Z”. I’ve always assumed it was an East Coast thing. It’s used when you’ve had a conflict with someone and are feeling residual negative emotions about them personally. It’s a temporary feeling, however, unlike bitterness. You’d expect to not feel salty for long.
Outside gaming it’s used a lot among sports fans but exclusively to refer to fans of other teams. My team’s fans are appropriately indignant because they were unfairly defeated. Your team’s fans are salty because we whooped your ass, and you’re just blaming the referee because you don’t want to admit your inferiority.
I wouldn’t consider salty and bitter to be equivalent, either. Salty is being acid-tongued because your feathers are ruffled/your jimmies have been rustled.
Salty as an adjective, applied to language, usually means obscene. I assume it refers to the language sailors might use. This could also be the derivation for the meanings above, without the obscenity so to speak.
“I feel salty” = “I feel like swearing but I am not going to.”
Whether it came from that or not, it’s the general assumption that people I know have about its use: “I’m just being salty” => “I’m swearing like a sailor” => “pardon my French”.
