The ever-changing internet trends and the slang that comes with them can be unsettling, but sometimes it reveals something that has real staying power. For example, the word "zaddy" is no longer just a word you use when talking to long-time online friends—I'm pretty sure my mom recently used it to describe her undying fascination with Richard Gere. Then there's "cheugy," which cemented itself in the lexicon in 2021 and still makes millennials fear being labeled as such.
Sometimes these words are made up (see above), and sometimes they're just repackaged from their original form to appeal to the meme-scrolling meme-loving internet-dead masses. Take "rizz" (short for charisma), which started as an internal TikTok joke and went on to be named Oxford University's 2023 Word of the Year.
Currently, the term "yap" and all its derivatives are undergoing a similar linguistic transformation. Even Beyoncé uses the term on her new album Cowboy Carter : "When they know there's a slapping sound, they bark."
According to TikTok and X, you're no longer an annoying person who talks too much, you're just a nag. According to Merriam-Webster, yap is “to speak in a sharp and sustained manner”—the human conversational equivalent of a hairless Chihuahua’s bark. But now, being able to roar is actually a compliment. The cute iteration of the noun ("yapper") is a label you can claim back with pride and find your online community where others struggle to know when to shut up.
"Yap" means the ability to talk about anything. It's less risky than gossip, but more fun than small talk. "Every loudmouth girlfriend needs a listening boyfriend," X user @hotmessjunk wrote on a viral photo of Taylor Swift talking to boyfriend Travis Kelce with her mouth open . TikTok user @_lils_ posted a video with the caption "When I meet someone who loves to talk, we can talk for hours without running out of things to say," in which she parodied The act of taking notes. The post received more than 500,000 likes and thousands of comments from other gossips and those who love them.
"My chatty guy and I never finish a conversation. It's just a long inner monologue shared," one person wrote. "I'm not a yapper myself, but I love being around one," another person wrote.
Maybe these talkative and unspoken relationships are the 2024 version of "black cat and golden retriever energy," another altered version of the Bubba-Cheechie phenomenon that just reiterates the age-old trend in a way that appeals to people. The “opposites attract” mentality means they spend too much time on their favorite platforms.
Online, users are always looking for the next “core” to take over their feed, and the next “ification” to define a moment. 2023 is about girlhood, the year when it’s all about coquettishness, the cuteness of existence. Last December, people celebrated by putting bows on their food, remember? The internet's most addicted users like to keep things cute - they call grown men babygirls, and for God's sake they can't get enough of the nickname "Pookie" - so why not give someone who pukes a lot A cute little word for someone? The next trend? If "yapper" continues to dominate internet information flows, it's only a matter of time before it becomes a full-blown etymological phenomenon in real life. Hey, if I could yell about the word itself, there must be something to it.
