Who cares, we won't be watching the movie anyway.
Oh, yes, I just want to make out a lot.
And do other stuff...
Hm..
Alright, getting ready to be nervous for 20 minutes about when to touch you.
And how we decide to sit now will determine a precedent about the rest of our relationship.
"Netflix and chill"
It's a phrase that's pretty common today and can be found both in offline conversations
and on websites like Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, Twitter, YikYak, and more.
It can be used in a lot of different ways, like to invite someone over to hook up or
to describe a date to your friends.
But what is Netflix and Chill?
Is it an internet meme?
Is it a euphemism for sex?
Can it be both?
In order to answer these questions, we have to start at the beginning.
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LingLab is the brainchild of a few linguistic students from the NC State linguistics program.
But it's also a new edition to the North Carolina Language and Life Project.
#NCLLP Check us out online to see all the cool stuff
we're doing.
Memes are an idea or element of social behavior passed on through generations in a culture,
especially by imitation.
These have been around since long before the internet but have exploded in recent years
as a way to describe the viral content that spreads through social media.
The term was originally coined by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book, "The Selfish Gene"
He describes them as an idea that evolves similarly to biological evolution.
Memes that are good at replicating themselves tend to leave more copies in a culture.
Memes that aren't die out.
How do we define a meme?
According to Brent Silby of the University of Canterbury, memes are a set of instructions
that produce a behavior.
For example, if a certain type of scarf is more in style, people make this scarf a meme
by wearing it.
When someone sees someone else wearing that scarf and then they begin to wear that same
style themselves, the meme is being passed along through the population successfully.
How does this apply to the internet?
An internet meme is slightly different from what Dawkins was describing.
Patrick Davidson, a PhD candidate in media, culture, and communication at NYU defines
an internet meme as a piece of culture, typically a joke, which gains influence through online
transmission.
However, this isn't quite accurate anymore.
In her research on new media and digital culture in Utrecht University, Linda Börzsei argues
that an online meme is a form of visual entertainment which can manifest in many different formats,
such as a still image, an animated gif, or even a video.
The largest online site for meme and internet research is "Know Your Meme," a website that
tracks the origins and development of online memes.
This site allows anyone to contribute, but has a strictly moderated system and fact checks
most, if not all, of their entries.
Online meme resources, such as this one, are useful for keeping track of the evolution
of the internet influenced dialect of English.
One of the more recent examples of internet memes interacting with English is with the
new form of "because."
In 2012, young people started using "because" as a preposition.
For example, you can see this meme that says "I like this because reasons."
According to Mark Liberman from Language Log, this usage is often associated with an implication
that the line of reasoning is weak, like the example in the image above.
This seems to have come from a Craigslist post made on January 26, 2011 selling a Mazda
MX3.
The seller writes that the car is completely stripped inside "because race car."
This quickly caught on, with a website being dedicated to this meme by March of the same
year.
Now, because can be used with any noun but particularly proper nouns.
This has spread from the internet since its creation and is now regularly found in offline
speech.
According to an article on Fusion.net by Kevin Roose, "Netflix & chill" starting appearing
on Twitter as early as 2009.
The first recorded tweet comes from user @NoFaceNina.
She says "I'm about to log onto Netflix and chill for the rest of the night."
However, this usage is different from how the phrase is used today.
What NoFaceNina means is that they are gonna open up Netflix for a few hours in order to
relax and unwind.
This meaning has no sexual connotation and doesn't imply that anyone else is coming over
to join either.
By 2012 the phrase had turned into an idiom.
Twitter users started using it without a verb at all.
It began appearing with the ampersand (&) symbol instead of "and".
@MsMariah19 tweeted, "It's been a Netflix & chill type of day".
The first references to Netflix & chill as a euphemism began appearing in the fall of 2014.
For example, @it'sIsaaaaaaac says, "Neflix and chill never means Netflix and chill now
a days lol"
After this, "Netflix and chill" began to spread to other social media sites.
It appeared on Vine as a gif alongside image memes on Instagram and more.
In essence, it went viral.
In April of 2015, "Netflix and chill" was added to UrbanDictionary.
The first posted definition is, "netflix and chill: code for two people going to each others
houses and fucking or doing other sexual related acts"
Soon, "Netflix and chill" became solidified into pop culture.
In August of 2015, musician B.o.B released a song called "Netflix and chill".
By September, Netflix had jumped on the bandwagon and released a prototype of a Netflix switch
at the World Maker Fair in New York.
This switch can dim the lights in your house, silence your phones, and turn on Netflix to
the connected TV.
Now, "Netflix and chill" has been shared so many times that people are starting to get
creative with it.
Across all forms of social media, you can find examples of "something" "and chill" that
are changed to be relevant to the current events.
For example, on YikYak in early October, I found the example "Democratic Debate and chill?"
These modified memes maintain the sexual innuendo of "do this thing and then have sex."
I sent out a Google poll to see what other forms of "Netflix and chill" kept the same meaning.
The most similarly rated replies were:
"Watch Netflix and Chill" "Movie and Chill"
"Watch TV and Chill"
Each of these getting over 100 votes.
The next most similar were:
"Netflix and Hangout" "HBO and Chill"
"YouTube and Chill" and "Chill and Netflix"
However, by collecting examples on YikYak alone, I found more than 30 new memes about
"Netflix and chill" in one week.
Thus, "Netflix and chill" has developed from an ordinary phrase to a full-fledged meme.
But if it's a meme, and if the multiple meanings are a part of pop culture, can it still function
as a euphemism?
What is a Euphemism?
A euphemism is the practice of talking about something offensive or delicate in terms that
make it sound more pleasant than it really is.
This removes the negativity from the word or topic.
The most common topics that occur with euphemisms are sex, death, killing, crime, disease, and
bodily functions.
Finding creative ways to talk about sex isn't a new phenomenon.
In fact, since the time of Old English in 1100 AD, people have been shying away from
directly discussing sexual actions and sexual propositions.
In Britain in 1598, for example, you might have said that you knocked your date last
night, rather than to say to say you had sex with them.
In 1870, "diddle" meant both to move jerkily from side to side as well as having a sexual
connotation.
English also takes euphemisms from other languages.
In 1969 you may replace "sex" with the Yiddish word "shtup," which literally means "push."
In his book titled "Euphemisms," John Ayto discusses the different strategies behind euphemisms.
These include understatement, vagueness, hiding frightening issues, and political correctness.
In the case of sex, both understatement and vagueness apply.
For example, when talking to a friend at a coffeeshop about a date the night before,
you may want to use vague language to hint a sexual activities that took place without
outright saying them in public.
This allows you to talk about sex without being explicit, which is polite both to the
person you're talking to as well as the people around you who aren't a part of the conversation.
You can also use euphemisms as indirect requests.
A request is one of the many different types of speech acts.
John Searle, a professor of philosophy at UC Berkeley, defines an indirect speech act
as saying something that communicates more than what was actually said.
In other words, you're being polite.
Experimental psychologist Steven Pinker discusses how euphemisms are a polite way of requesting
to have sexual interactions with someone.
[Pinker:] Well, one remaining problem, which is why we resort to indirectness even when
there is no real uncertainty.
For example, when the listener knows the speaker's intent.
People aren't naive and it's hard to believe that any grown woman could be fooled by
the line about the etchings, none the less there is something that is more comfortable
about asking to see etchings than asking for sex.
So what is going on there?
The deniability is not really plausible.
Why should an obvious innuendo still feel more comfortable than a direct overture that
is in some sense "on the record"?
Pinker argues that direct sexual overtures are more awkward than indirect sexual overtures
due to mutual knowledge.
For example, asking someone to come over and see you etchings allows for both parties to
pretend that this indirect sexual request may have been completely innocent.
In the case of a rejection, this allows people to maintain a comfortable friendship, since
it might be the case that either person in the conversation didn't know the request had
sexual undertones.
This can't be done with direct sexual requests since there's no vagueness or ambiguity and
the sexual request enters the mutual knowledge of both people in the conversation.
Euphemisms are created in a lot of different ways.
One way is to speak around a word, implying it without saying it directly.
Eventually, these avoidances turn into established euphemisms for that word.
Another example is to change the pronunciation or spelling of a taboo word.
This is known as "taboo deformation" and is commonly found with the four-letter words
of English.
For example, the SyFy program Battlestar Galactica replaced one particular four-letter word with
"frak" so that the characters could swear on broadcast television.
What's up?
Nothing sir, just another leak in that frakking window.
To summarize, here are the guidelines for how to determine if something is a euphemism.
First, the word or phrase has to be a polite way of saying something else, most likely
something taboo.
And second, there must be shared knowledge of the euphemistic meaning of the word or
phrase.
Or, more simply, both people have to be on board with what's actually being said.
In order to figure out if "Netflix and Chill" is a euphemism, another question in the Google
poll I mentioned earlier asked what people thought the definition of the idiom was.
276 people responded.
The majority of responses came from heterosexual females between the ages of 18 and 25.
Here's what I found when I asked people what Netflix and Chill meant:
84% of people agree that Netflix and Chill is a euphemism for having sex.
So, in answer to my questions at the beginning of this podcast, Netflix and Chill is both
a meme and a euphemism.
In fact, both of these aspects probably amplify each other, increasing their relevance in English.
This project was made possible with help from Cadwell Turnbull, Karen Eisenhauer, and the Linguistics
Department at North Carolina State University.
For more linguistics related podcasts, check out the LingLab from the North Carolina Language
and Life Project.