euphemism » youthamism

Variant(s):  youthanism

Classification: English

Spotted in the wild:

  • I’d jokingly ’spaz out’ and rant that ‘Sheila’ is an Australian youthamism, but some one has removed large fonts from my arsenal. (rap music forum, Feb 26, 2008)
  • drop-kick a banana
    this is a sexual youthanism made up by my friend jay but now everyone in town and school uses it. He had an unripe banana for lunch so spat it out and drop-kicked it causing a suspicous white mess on his shoe. After trying to explain it, jay and eventually other use “drop-kick a banana” as referance to anything sexual involving both a penis and a foot. (Urban Dictionary, Jul 22, 2008)
  • As it is I will continue kicking and taking names as Solider Shepard. (Bioware video game forum, Jan 4, 2008)
  • Now that the Internet has been “to use a youthamism” unleashed, information technology can flourish in this newly interconnected web of routers and servers across the globe. (Linkedin Answers, March 2009)
  • is pepper some new youthamism i dont know about :p (Flickr comment, April 2009)
  • On an ‘unconnected’ story the Shanghai District Public Sanitation Bureau has just issued 50,000 maps of local public conveniences for taxi drivers, it describes the initiative as a way to “reduce environment pollution”. Which has to be one of the best youthanisms I have ever heard! (blog entry, Feb 23, 2008)

Analyzed or reported by:

Once in a while I select an eggcorn because it appears in the seach terms of visitors to this site (the Eggcorn Database & associated forums). When I saw “youthamism” ranked 15th both for the month of August 2009 and for the enitre year to date, it seemed to me that something of interest was happening here.

Peter Forster’s forum post, which attracted all these visits, lists two innovations: _youthamism_ as noted here, and the less eggcornish _euthamism_ (usually in effect a creative error for _euthanaisa_, maybe triggered by the less common -sia suffix). The variant _youthanism_ can be found, too, indeed at a higher frequency than _youthamism_. Both, as eggcornish substitutions for _euphemism_, rely on an association of coy camouflage of offending words with youth.

However, _youthanism_ and to a lesser degree _youthamism_ can occur in situations of questionable eggcorn status, in the sense of “youth slang” — a blendoid reshaping of euphemism, most likely:

* _You have to limit yourself on how many “get her done” and “gag me with a spoon” you can have in your life. Youthamism are just that, for the youth to use, no honest adult should fall for the MTV trappings._ (link)
* _Can we start calling young slang “youthanisms”?_ (link)
* _Reading numerous reviews of this hotel posted here is mystifying, many contrasting comments like “smells of urine” or “sparsely furnished,“ to such superlatives as “immaculate” and youthanisms like “Plush,” demonstrating that this hotels appeal is not bound by any generational gaps._ (link)

Last, for reasons that are not clear, we find cites where _youtha(n|m)ism_ is employed in the sense of “quote” or “maxim”:

* _I am doing a speech why Sir Paul McCartney should be on the 4th plynth in London..whatare some famous quotes? like quotes to help persuade people to have him up there. My teacher is fairly old - around 50-60 and likes old, famous quotes E.g. She likes the quote “lend me your ears” by William Shakespeare. Any youthanisms would be good._ (link)
* _need some help here… I need to know some youthanisms. I typed it into the search engine Google but it came up with nothing… By youthanisms i mean something like “I want to live life to it’s fullest” “I want to live out my time” “I want to live my 9 lives” That kind of stuff…_ (link)

| link | entered by Chris Waigl, 2009/08/26 |

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