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Vagueing?
Everytime I see videos like that, I have to remember the promise I made to myself not to become like my father.
It gets harder every year.i find it helps me to view other people explicitly as separate entities with free will.
Makes it harder to do any sort of funny business when you’re more aware of their autonomy on a fundamental level.
Sounds like something a figment of the imagination of the only person in the universe would say
I often think of the phrase “we judge others by their actions and ourselves by our intent,” usually while driving, and try to just let people live their life and their story.
but I am your father
Engaging in small talk is “nicebombing” and is psychopathic behaviour? Now I have seen everything…
Reminds me of how any guy who develops feelings for a woman, gets rejected and feels upset at being heartbroken is labelled a Nice Guy™, or worse, an incel.
Sometimes I wonder if an external influence of some kind has been messing with the psyche of the modern generations. Maybe decades of austerity, flouride in tap water, social media addiction, microplastics or vape fluids containing far nastier chemicals than nicotine?
wtf kinda world do these psychos wanna live in ? only text don’t talk. no calls only video conference. no music just music videos or vidvoks(letterkenny ftw) It’s about out of hand , git off my lawn!
Texting vs talking has some situational context. E.g. if you’re somewhere public, talking on the phone is often frowned upon, but you may text quietly. In a car it’s reversed.
But a lot of us old folks do want people to sit down and shut up. It likely also plays into impressions of foreigners—a lot of immigrants are probably doing something they consider normal by talking on the phone on the bus, while everyone around them thinks they’re being incredibly rude.
Calls and meetings can often be an email, too. Better to not disrupt others if you can avoid it.
this just terminally online brain rot
A screenshot of an Instagram reel of a Tumblr post? Okay.
I agree, this needed more layers.
not enough layers
Laura apparently doesn’t know cell phone screen shot etiquette… You can only post screen shots if your cell phone battery is below 15%
Hmmm, is that mastodon?
Of course.
In my experience, yeah tiktok addicts are like this…
…but so are tumblr addicts.
They just have a more esoteric/niche set of triggering conditioms, as well as a more esoteric/niche vocabulary used when emphatically proclaiming something hysterical, and they’re also angry that you have 0 clue what 90% of the terms or events or people or characters they’re referring to are.
Our species is more alone than we’ve ever been even though our numbers are greater than they’ve ever been and our means for reaching each other is nearly limitless.
Because everyone is so, so deeply scared of social rejection, an instinct bred into us through ice ages and apocalypses where we needed each other to survive, that the fear of rejections has become one of our primary social motivators. People now have a choice of trying to find social circles and groups that they can adapt to or compromise with like we’ve struggled through for thousands of years, or withdraw into spaces that prevent us from ever having to experience even a chance of rejection. Feel awkward when a stranger says hello? You can choose to practice getting better at responding to others, experience failures as well as successes, or you can retreat to a place where “hello” means oppression and you don’t ever need to ever risk pain by responding.
This is just a tiny, micro-slice of the issue but EVERYONE does this, and if you think you don’t, you are also stuck in the film-strip post-hoc rationalizing your every feeling.
You’re absolutely right about how deeply the fear of rejection is embedded in us—it’s instinctual, a relic of survival. But here’s the thing: in our modern world, that same fear doesn’t protect us the way it once did. Instead, it traps us. It makes us bend and shape ourselves to fit into spaces we may not even want to be in, just to avoid discomfort.
The truth is, we all need connection, but the path to genuine connection isn’t through constant adaptation or hiding in safety bubbles—it’s through authenticity. When you stop worrying so much about how others perceive you and start living for yourself, two things happen: you begin to feel freer and more at peace, and your openness creates a magnetism that draws others toward you.
Awkwardness, rejection, and failure? They’re inevitable, but they also don’t define you. Each time you stop rationalizing avoidance and choose to show up as your full self, you break that fear’s hold on you. You discover what really matters: living authentically, for you, not for validation or social survival.
That’s where real strength comes from—not from being universally accepted but from no longer needing to be. And ironically, the less you care about how others perceive you, the more meaningful connections you end up making.
That was nicely written, and i think i probably needed to hear a lot of it. Thanks for taking the time to post that here.
Since when is vague a verb?
“Edit” and “access” also weren’t originally verbs. Same with “babysit” and “eavesdrop”. Backformation and category changing are common and perfectly natural processes in English.
Edit: This isn’t directed at the OP of this comment chain, but I’m always surprised by the crazy amount of ignorant prescriptivism I see all over Lemmy. Like, I expected that shit on Reddit, but I thought we were better than that here, especially since literally the only real reason for prescriptivism is sowing class division and excluding people for not having access to the secret knowledge of “correct” (yuck!) grammar.
I understand language changes over time but sometimes it’s stupider than others
From your biased, subjective point of view that has nothing to do with the objective facts of language, maybe.
Objectively, any words with more than two vocals in succession is dumb and only meant for cheating at Scrabble, objectively
verbing a word that isn’t commonly verbed? that’s the main thing i love in the English langauge, the flexibility to fuck around with it and still be understood by others without having to explain what you’re doing
Now you’re Englishing proper m8.
Literally didn’t understand it
Using the suffix
-erfor a two syllable word isn’t any correcter than verbing a noun and would probably make quite a few English teachers red in the face.Both have a linguistic use; the verb “vaguing” is a shortened form of the cumbersome “vague-posting”, while “stupider” is a more emphatic and/of colloquial form of “more stupid”. Neither can be replaced by their more formal form without changing the meaning of the sentence slightly.
Objectively they are very similar linguistic quirks, the only reason you’d use one but dislike the other is familiarity. Why dismiss it out of hand when you can excitedly marvel at a novel way people can remotely transfer thoughts?
Why are so many people okay with “vague posting” also? If people are posting vaguely so often you need to make up a weird term for it, the reaction is to go to another space, not adopt yet another abbreviation to accommodate such shitbirds
i mean, you understood the meaning of the sentence, right? so the person managed to get their point accross, and saved on length by using that form - that’s actually quite linguistically clever!
I got an idea that the person was venting/ranting but couldn’t understand the specifics of the term “vauguing”. There’s so many mistakes in their response that I just assumed it was a typo.
Looks likes it’s a word that been around since the 1600s but is pretty much never used anymore.
https://www.oed.com/dictionary/vaguing_adj?tl=true&tab=factsheet
I could only guess the meaning. Disagree all around
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Did you Google that?
Nope, I can do this all day. Other fun examples of backformation off the top of my head are: “to burgle” from “burglar” (which the Brits still get mad about), originally from the Latin agent noun burglator from the verb burgare; and “cherry”, backformed from Old French cerise, which was reinterpreted as a plural (even though it wasn’t one), and then a new singular form was backformed. The same thing happened to “pea” (though that’s a native English word) - you can still see the original “pease” in the old nursery rhyme: “Pease porridge hot, pease porridge cold, pease porridge in a pot nine days old”.
We don’t get mad about burgle, that’s just a normal word. I do remember thinking I’d gone insane the first time I heard someone unironically use the word “burglarize” to mean “burgle” though!
I was making a joke with a modern example of a noun being verbified, but thank you for your insight.
Oh wow, I’m feeling very whooshed at the moment. Sorry about that.
Verbing weirds language.
“Vagueing” as in “vagueposting”.
Since someone used it as a verb and it was understood by their audience
Keep complaining and it’s going to be a noun next
Why don’t you have a vague about it
Girls have a vaguena.
Shutup Vague.
I’m joking please don’t get mad at me.
You’re so vague that you probably think this song ain’t about you.
There must be some sort of place somewhere for people like… Wait, what were we talking about?
‘vagueing abt me being ableist’
‘implying i was ableist’
There, translated.
Oh look, proper english is more direct and succinct!
Guess the tumblr user likes vagueing as well.
Not quite, they would’ve been implying someone was ableist, not anyone in particular.
Did you not read the text in the tags?
one time i talked about the weather to someone i didn’t know that well
and later that night i checked their twitter and they were vagueing abt me being ableist bc ‘i forced them to do small talk’
We have the author, and a specific, other person, the person the author talked about the weather to, whom the author knows the twitter handle of.
Again, the author states:
they were vagueing abt me
abt is shorthand for about.
they were vagueing about me
The ‘vagueing’ is directed at the author, according to author.
Is it theoretically possible that some other person asked twitter person about the weather, temporally near when the author did, and the author is mistaken?
Sure.
… And also, no, you can’t meet my girlfriend, she goes to another school, and yes I can get your Xbox Live account banned, my dad works at Microsoft.
You can’t prove those things aren’t true, so if you challenge me on that, that means you don’t trust me and that means you’re a bad friend.
Now I’m gonna post “Boy it sure is disheartening when your friends question everything you ever say to them” on twitter.
… See how this works?
That wouldn’t be vaguing if that was the case, it would be specifically implying.
So, are you telling me that the author used vagueing incorrectly?
Or are you telling me that my translation, which did correctly translate what the author wrote, is incorrect?
Doesn’t really matter, you’d be incorrect either way.
A way that person A can imply something about person B, is to describe person B, or something person B did, without directly naming person B.
Whenever person A ‘does a vagueing’ about person B, they are intentionally referencing person B, but in an indirect manner.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/imply
imply
transitive verb
: to express indirectly
Her remarks implied a threat.
The news report seems to imply his death was not an accident.
This means the implied object of the person A’s vagueing is person B, as opposed to person B being the outright stated, directly specified object.
This means when they are indirectly talking about person B without directly mentioning them, they are implying that they are talking about person B, they’re just doing so in a manner that allows for plausible deniability if actually directly asked who they are talking about.
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Vagueing
Vagueing
Posting or talking about drama without naming the specific details.
“Lindsay just tweeted ‘no tears left to cry over you b’”
“OMG no way, she’s totally vagueing about Connor”
The entire point of vagueing / vagueposting is to passive aggressively complain about a person / event whilst also setting up a plausible deniability defense, so that the vagueposter can gaslight anyone who wants to clarify what the object of their vaguepost was.
Linguistically, ‘vagueing about’ is itself a less active voiced and less direct way of saying ‘implying’.
Its akin to ‘the cop shot the dog’ vs ‘the dog was killed by gunfire from the cop’.
The entire construction makes the person who did the implying, did the vagueing, less directly connected to the object they were making implications, or vagueing, about.
In that sense, vagueing is an even more vague amd indorect term to use than implying.
…
Bottom line:
Ableism Accuser is implying Tumblr Poster is ableist by vagueing about Tumblr Poster.
They are indirectly complaining about and accusing them, by not specifically directing the complaint and accusation at Tumblr Poster by name.
Vagueing / vagueposting is always, necessarily, also implying, always involves implying… because all these terms refer to speaking about a specific person, action, event, thing… indirectly, without full detail.
Thank you. I’m so sick of people jumping on ‘oh language changes over time’ when others are just using words wrong.
I’d say it isn’t wrong, per se; english, especially american english has a long history of ‘verbing’ nouns…
… But at least in this case, it is less precise and more cumbersome than not using slang.
That and of course, if you’ve never seen or heard it used this way, it is confusing.
So… not wrong… but not useful, concise, or efficient.
You could use a verb that just directly connects the subject to the object, but when you take an adjective and ‘verbify’ it, now you have to construct a phrase to do that… and it still results in a more passive voicing.
Its only more succinct if the sentence has no specified object, no thing that the verb is acting on.
I’m vagueing.
You’re vagueing.
They’re vagueing.
…etc.
It’s less archaic if you’re familiar with the term “vague posting”, meaning to post something specifically about someone but not to mention them by name (but usually enough information for those who know both parties to know who the post is about).
Seems like it’s been shortened to just the first word.
I don’t think archaic is the word you mean… as the use of vagueing as a verb is fairly new, not fairly old.
Archaic would be like… betwixt, hither, goodly, plain (meaning not very attractive), anon (meaning immediately), methinks…
… words that once were commonly used, but have much more widely used modern replacements.
Anyway, yes I’m familiar with the term vague posting, and I agree that it is a very likely etymological antecedent of vagueing.
Doesn’t change that vagueing as a verb is more clumsy to use in a sentence which intends to specify an object.
Both vague posting and vagueing work well to describe the actions of only a subject, but yeah, they are more awkward to use when you want to specify an object of the vague posting or vagueing.
They can’t be conjugated on their own, to do that requires helper words, auxilliary verbs.
On their own, they are always in the continuous tense.
… Though I guess you could say vagues, vagued, vagueing…
… but at that point I’d argue the connection to communicating in online posts is lost, and it would begin to apply to any kind of communication where a person is being vague, losing the specificity of ‘it’s not vague to those with insider/first-hand knowledge’.
As far as zoomer/alpha slang goes, this makes a HELL of a lot more sense than most of the shit they’ve turned into verbs and the vast lexicon of terms they have for people who disappoint them.
slang is the way it is for a reason, it’s why its called slang lmao.
Sick literally didn’t make any sense the way people used it when it was new, same shit today, just different words, times change old man!
Every generation has a word soup vocabulary that generations prior don’t get or can’t use properly. It mostly falls out of vogue in a few years. Almost all of the words that are being used ironically to make fun of the lexicon, will become obsolete. The words that don’t get the highest usage and remain stable in unironic use will move forward with the rest of the English language. That’s just how language works.
Cool.
(See what i did there)
Since we’ve all had to rework any word referencing Twitter for obvious reasons, I suppose.
“Posting” is fine, all the dumb “toots” and “skeets” are not. If you’re trying to salvage “vaguetweeting” I suppose that is a semi-reasonable outcome. I don’t think it works quite as well for subtweeting, though.
What the hell is vaguetweeting though?
Vagueposting istthe replacement word. It means posting about someone or a situational without being precise about the person or event
Like. … “Wishing some people would mind their own business”. Or “Life can be really hard sometimes, but you’ve got to push through”. With no context, or explanation. Basically seeking attention or sympathy.
Kinda like that yes, but often a bit more specific to a situation, like the example the OP mentioned “an ableist tried to make small talk about the weather” etc.
Half the time it isn’t even that clear what they are posting about.
That’s jus tweeting in general.
Also, I realize the resulting confusion means this was technically “vaguing”/vagueposting itself. Recursion!
Tweeting vaguely / Vaguely tweeting.
I don’t know what a vaguetweet is either, but that’s fucking gross too
What about using the word “tweet” to refer to a post in any microblogging platform
I could live with that, but… I mean, “post” is right there. And with the lines blending over time between “microblogging”, this more forum-like pseudo-reddit thing, Instagram-style image-centered posts… I just don’t know that the per-platform distinction is worth it anymore, with or without the Twitter nonsense.
This is so true, it has been really sad watching people I care about get sucked into this cycle of anti accountability for their actions and behaviors, and then sabotage all of their relationships in a vicious cycle of misunderstanding and anger.
Its wild to watch society at large do this more and more often, from the outside, as a non corpo, algorithm driven social media user.
People are unlearning, or just never learning, how to be accountable, how to communcate precisely, at a linguistic level… and hyperbole just keeps getting presented as literality.
The only thing I can compare it to is 1984’s newspeak, but that is all top down, mandated, enforced… and this is … organic, but amplified by our communication methods being maximized for drama.
The average person increasingly just has no actual linguistic/mental ability to convey a precise thought.
Its even impacting the art we make.
Idiot plots.
Idiot plots everywhere, more and more entire shows either heavily involve or entirely revolve around characters continuously making increasingly emotionally elevated judgements against other characters, which all could have been solved or avoided if one or two or three of them just said a few things that were more precise and less vague at key plot beats.
Maybe we need a name for a trope that is a subtype of the idiot plot, for a plot that only happens because everyone is emotionally bipolar/hypercharged, and also is incapable of directly and accurately asking a question, answering a question, making a statement, incapable of not using loaded questions, vague answers, and ‘Schrödinger’s Irony’ style statements, where its just a joke if immediate reception is negative, but totally serious if reception is positive.
Its wild to watch society at large do this more and more often, from the outside, as a non corpo, algorithm driven social media user.
ironically, i’ve sort of done this at a smaller scale among some of the communities im in, and you would not believe how stupid people are, even when you literally inform them to their face that you’re saying stupid shit for the purposes of saying stupid shit.
rage bait is incredibly effective and there’s a reason everything using it goes so far. It’s innate to the human psyche.
oh and by the way, for anybody who thinks this is like unethical or whatever, trust me, they LOVE eating it up. You would not believe how much shitpost you can do, before people realize that you might be shitposting.
I ended up abandoning most of my online ‘friends’ because their entire vocabulary devolved into thought stopping cliches, canned meme responses to almost every situation, apathy, Schrödinger’s Irony style statements that are either ‘obviously ironic jokes’ or ‘completely sincere and serious’ depending on their immediate reception…
Just completely duplicitous hypocrites, actively mocking any attempt to have a serious conversation about a serious subject… but highly interested in having extremely lenghty discussions about trivial, unimportant topics, in ambiguous, inconsistent and highly emotionally charged vocabulary, with anecdotally, vibes based ‘logic’ always trumping actual empirical data and properly backed theories.
hey that’s ableist!
apart from that, yeah i agree with you. in general, if you compare Trump’s and Hitler’s speeches, you can see how extremely complicated some sentences that Hitler said were. Watch some (AI english dubbed, starting around 30 seconds in). Compare that to Trump’s speeches, whose vocabulary seems to consist of 5 words.
Yeah, quality has gone down, it seems. I just talked to my aunt and grandma about this exact same thing yesterday. Everything seems to gradually loose quality, or in other words, enshittify.
(btw, i do not mean to say that Hitler’s speeches were “good”; i was merely pointing out that the clarity of expression has gone down. The same can be seen with automobiles, houses, and many other things.)
Btw, I remember reading an article that said, after 2000, universities in the USA specifically tried to erode clarity in speech, because they found it proper. It’s called post-structuralism; structuralism referring to “clarity”. I hoped i summarized that well.
It might have something to do, or not, but it definitely is a coincidence.
Yeah, if you follow the Flesch-Kincaid reading level of Presidential speeches over time, that’s another way you can broadly track American English just literally being dumbed down over time.
Trump basically only speaks in stream of consciousness, run-on sentences that are so vague that my 6th grade English teacher would describe as ‘word vomit.’
Speaking of 6th grade… the average adult American reading proficiency is now between a 5th and 6th grader.
Less than 10% of the population is capable of critically comparing contrasting stories about the same thing from different sources, and pointing out their differences and comparative biases.
Something like 30% of the population is functionally illiterate, only able to read extremely simple instructions and basically children’s books.
EDIT: Also, its not a coincidence.
Republicans, for longer than I’ve been alive, have been wrecking public education.
Why? Stupid people are easier to lie to.
The average person increasingly just has no actual linguistic/mental ability to convey a precise thought.
One of my most frightening and profound realizations as an adult, was that our language is our most powerful tool and nobody seems to know or care. It’s how we can abstract the universe, rearrange ideas and concepts and come up with new ways to approach problems and explain feelings.
Because if you’re not consciously explaining your feelings, you’re unconsciously doing it, and make no mistake, your brain is ONLY a tool for telling a story to explain your feelings. It’s not some vast computer or calculator, it’s a hyper-charged neural network designed to write stories to tie up loose ends and provide cause and effect for the world around you. It doesn’t seek logic or reason, it just wants continuity.
The sooner you realize this in life, the sooner you can start getting a handle on things like your own mental health, identifying rumination and where it comes from, figuring out what choices give you the best outcomes and how to overcome momentary discomfort for great rewards later. Things that our disconnected world is increasingly having a harder and harder time doing.
Because we’re abandoning language. And no, listening to social media and reading posts doesn’t boost your language, it doesn’t train your brain how to take YOUR experiences and feelings and abstractify them into ideas you can move around and view from different perspectives… something we should be able to do with ease if we have a large enough toolset to make accurate pictures of our lives. Social media and reading posts doesn’t boost you abilities to accurately abstractify the world and your life, it just gives you other people’s stories. Which are usually equally inaccurate or limited in scope.
If we don’t have language tools to help your brain write a more accurate story, you will believe terrible things about yourself, about others, about the entire world, and you will live in that state always.
