What Does Thirsty Mean In Slang Words
First Words
It's Easy to Be Chosen 'Thirsty' on Social Media. What Near on Capitol Hill?
In his 1936 personal-evolution opus "How to Win Friends and Influence People," Dale Carnegie quoted the Vienna-born scientist Hans Selye: "Every bit much as we thirst for approval, we dread condemnation." Non much has inverse in this regard, except that now, every bit much as we thirst for approval, nosotros dread being condemned precisely for being and so "thirsty."
"Thirst," in recent black and then internet slang, describes a graceless demand for approval, amore or attention, ane then raw that it creeps people out. Information technology calls to mind the panting tongues, jutting eyeballs, springing hearts and steam-shooting ears of Looney Toons characters. Or those mewling, suggestive, desperate-to-please selfies that people post to social media to elicit precisely that cartoon-wolf reaction — a type of image commonly known as a "thirst trap."
"Thirst" doesn't just want something; it makes an unsightly spectacle of a clueless, grasping, gaping need. It encroaches on boundaries and intrudes on others' space, jostling cocky-respect and good gustation out of the style. The more commonplace the word has become over the past few years, the more than it has come to describe a condition that exists on a very wide spectrum. The guy who eagerly favorites your every social post is thirsty. The co-worker who's always fishing for the boss's praise is thirsty. The brand that tries very hard to be cool is thirsty. The rally-obsessed, Twitter-incontinent politician is thirsty. The acquaintance who'south always suggesting you get together for brunch is thirsty — or maybe you're but judgmental and mean.
There'southward always been something slightly derogatory about the way we speak of a thirst for wealth, fame, power or attention. The poet William Cowper wrote about "Low ambition and the thirst of praise." Byron wrote about "A thirst for gold. The beggar'south vice." Chekhov wrote nearly "the thirst for powerful sensations," and Madame de Staël wrote about how "genius inspires this thirst for fame." At this point, even the modern version of the word has been absorbed into the lexicon and then thoroughly that information technology hardly stands out as slang anymore. Its usage has get barely distinguishable from its classical applications — only now it has an added layer of contempt, suggesting that the condition it describes has simply grown worse or that we've grown less tolerant of information technology.
Lately, in fact, the notion of thirst has edged into an inhibiting kind of judgment. It has morphed into a discouraging, feel-bad meme — a strong means of condemning any kind of overreach. About of that condemnation is richly deserved. In a recent column, Frank Bruni chosen out the most parched legislator of the moment, Devin Nunes, who was described by a source as "an overeager goofball" and a bumbling chocolate-brown-noser, oblivious to "the line betwixt ingratiating and stupid," who jangled John Boehner's nerves with his "indiscriminate pep" and "constant bumming of his cigarettes."
Of grade, Nunes pales in comparison to the giant sucking sound that is the person whose approval he most thirsts for — our electric current president, whose every activity seems driven by the need to prove to others how smart, powerful, rich and sexy he is. From gold-plating every square inch of his life to bragging to a C-list boob tube personality about sexual assault, from tweeting rancorously almost "S.North.L." at all hours (Paul Krugman: "One look at his Twitter business relationship is enough to bear witness that victory has washed zippo to slake his thirst for ego gratification") to marrying women ever younger than him who choose to live farther and further from him, Donald Trump is driven by a thirst for blessing so powerful and drastic that information technology has grossed out much of the nation and freaked out much of the globe.
"Thirst" was get-go added to the Urban Dictionary in 2003, merely its utilise hitting its first great tiptop quondam effectually 2014, the year Diet Coke introduced the thirstiest ad campaign in history. One advertisement'south tagline seemed to advise any number of foreign things: that drinking soda was like snorting cocaine, that the average Diet Coke drinker was prone to using sex activity to accelerate her career, maybe even that she was plainly desperate and needed to be reined in. ("Exist ambitious, not thirsty. You're on Nutrition Coke.") That line was the epitome of thirst, flailing haplessly to connect a soda brand to a buzzword. The campaign was roundly mocked and quickly pulled, and it made me wonder if Dos Equis'south long-running "The Virtually Interesting Man in the Globe" campaign — "Stay thirsty, my friends" — was sincere or stealthily mocking the least interesting men in the world.
In December 2014, Jezebel posted a list of 100 very thirsty people, moments and things nether the headline "The Unquenchable Yr," rooting out clueless desperation wherever it dwelt: Aaron Sorkin, bachelor parties, Kris Jenner, Kim Jong-united nations, journalism every bit a discipline. Reading information technology was like having your 3rd eye pried open while cycling through Plutchik's Wheel of Emotions, only with all the positive feelings grayed out.
Two years afterwards, "thirst" remains with us as the mot juste for these and other people, moments and things — and the evidence of that thirst has only grown more than undeniable. It lingers in mirror and automobile selfies, in Nunes'south midnight White Business firm runs and in Paul Ryan's Beanie Boo face up. (Thirst is not, for the record, partisan: Consider Bernie Sanders's courting of millennial voters terminal year.)
And all the same, whenever I run across the word, it troubles me longer than it should. Something about it rankles. Why thirst, precisely, and non some other basic human condition resulting from need? Perhaps information technology has something to do with the things we thirst for — things like approval, attention, affection, recognition; all the interdependent needs. The things nosotros deride as being "thirsty" are the things that lack value in the optics of the macho, leather-faced American individualist, so they invite macho, stone-faced derision. Hunger, for instance, is described every bit a presence, a motivating fire in the belly, simply thirst is derided as a girly lack. Entitlement plays a part, too. We "hunger" for success, because we corroborate of success. Hunger is associated with want, whereas thirst is associated with need.
But I as well tend to retrieve that it's considering "thirst" gets at an epistemological problem: a crunch of beingness, or how to be, in the world every bit information technology is at present. It puts y'all into an unsettling double demark. It reframes a basic, lower-order need as a moral, social, aesthetic and personal failure. Our strange attachment to the give-and-take is hinted at by the fact that a global water crunch is in full flower, the globe is increasingly parched, Earth Water Twenty-four hour period was commemorated just last month — and however the give-and-take "thirsty" is doused in judgment. Is it because "thirst" volition kill yous first?
"Thirsty" is a unisex put-down, but that doesn't mean information technology's not gendered. A man is thirsty when he fails to cloak his libido or his instincts in a perfectly calibrated mix of empathy and arctic. A adult female is thirsty when she fails to cloak her emotional needs or insecurities backside a posture of detachment. "Thirsty" reinforces gender stereotypes while coolly pretending not to. It expresses our ambivalent relationship with desire — our constant negation of it, our vigilant policing of it. It gets at who is allowed to want things, and in what way we are allowed to want them.
Trump's bare-faced thirstiness stands in specially glaring contrast to Obama's impeccable chill. This resembles every other fourth dimension the tyranny of cool has been rebelled confronting. These things get in cycles: A Romantic eruption of feeling tends to follow in the wake of Classical reserve. Frank emotiveness and sensitivity become culturally sanctioned once more, emo comes dorsum and we enter a supposedly more than feminine cycle. Only this time, rather than usher in a more frankly emotional phase, we've ushered in something suppressive — the full denial of feeling, of experience. Information technology's not idealism in the air around our leadership or whatever kind of desire (greed excepted); it'due south a lack, a void, a deficit.
I recoil as much equally the next person from the egotistic behaviors "thirst" takes downwardly. But I just as often find myself recoiling from its inhibiting furnishings. Equally Anaïs Nin wrote: "Something is always born of excess. Great art was born of smashing terrors, great loneliness, peachy inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them." Nothing is built-in out of deficiency. Nin was reviled throughout her life and afterward for writing candidly about her desires — something few women are allowed to exercise without beingness branded an open up wound — and was only recently divested of her status as one of the thirstiest women of the 20th century. (Wanting, of form, is the impetus for getting, and we're still very selective about who gets to do that.) Simply after decades of enshrining ability, greed, lust and other ego-driven desires as the driving forces of American life, our antipathy for thirst seems to hint at a thirst for modify.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/04/magazine/its-easy-to-be-called-thirsty-on-social-media-what-about-on-capitol-hill.html
Posted by: kirkleyhichim.blogspot.com
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