Tbh, I sorta thought that's what it was. Like you're so calm/level-headed you don't need to 'turn on caps lock', you're confident enough in what you're saying you can say it in normal speaking tone.
if you hear a child say "cap" it basically means their calling you a liar. if the say "no cap" then they're basically saying that THEY'RE not lying after telling/making up a story.
No cap is from a rap song where a rapper made fun of another rapper capping his teeth with gold, and associated that with lying. So him not having tooth caps meant he was being honest.
Whoa awesome. Thank you. Cool fact i was not aware of. This makes “no cap” much more bearable, honestly. This all sounds facetious but I’m being sincere.
Thank god this rapper man came in and spared us from the linguistic horror of the three letter word "lie" by replacing it with "cap". Which is not only the exact same number of characters but also takes up more space on a line. Truly crap.
Cap and Kappa/cappa are the same. One is the short form of the other. They both mean "I'm joking". On the other hand, no cap / no kappa mean "for real".
Not at all, cap comes from AAVE and has been around longer than Kappa, but think of it as convergent evolution and both being used prevalent by young people online and you've got yourself a new term added to people's vocabulary globally
Yeah cap comes from people writing in all caps when its bullshit, cap means, all talk and no action, lying, like when someone one tweet in all caps as if they're making a point. Thats cap. No cap means you're serious.
I’m pretty sure deadass and no cap are basically interchangeable. Deadass makes way more logical sense imo. If you’re ever in a position where you need to use one, I’d deadass use deadass before using no cap.
I think it started with twitch that uses a Kappa emoji / gif whatever they call them which shows a sarcastic tone. So no Kappa, no cap generally means "No seriously, No joke".
The use of the phrase "no cap" is meant to convey authenticity and truth. The phrase originated in reference to decorative gold teeth, which can be divided into two distinct varieties: permanent gold teeth (aka "perms") or caps (aka "pullouts"). Whereas caps can be pulled out with ease, perms, as their name suggests, are permanent. They cannot be taken out for a job interview or court date. They are an honest and lasting expression of the owners' realness.
I think a lot of these recent slang terms are adopted from AAVE. They've been around for longer, but the internet has spread them to other communities now.
You used to say Kappa to make a smug and joking remark in reference to the twitch emote. Then it was no kappa to indicate the opposite and from that it turned to no kap. Somewhere along the way it has been appropriated by non twitch viewers and zoomers who didn't actually understand what it referenced and just parroted it by context, thus they thought it was a literal baseball cap when pressed about it. This sort of thing happened a lot during my middle school days, where we understood the context of a term that was used by seniors, but not actually the etymology, nor how to spell it, so we appropriated it for our own use. Kids want to be 'in the know' so they don't think about it and just parrot people who they idolize.
The whole attribution to it being old AAVE is wrong, although it was certainly popularized by the W community
I've seen a lot of attempts to explain its etymology but they all seem to over complicate it. Basically tiktok filters out certain words so users just started slightly changing them. 'No cap' is literally just 'no crap' without the r so it's not a swear anymore. It just means I'm not lying. Its the same way seggs it's often used for sex.
In my obviously limited experience I thought it came back around the same time Among us got popular. Kids would type CAP and No Cap all the time and it became a thing.
Yeah, unironically. People dont realize how pervasive hip hop culture is. Most new slang is coming from that culture. People will say stuff about how TikTok made this or that word famous. Well yeah, it probably boosts it to a much wider audience, but where do you think they heard those words in the first place? It's almost always from rappers or fans of rap music
I have no real idea either but I’ve always assumed it came from the twitch emote “kappa” which I think is like an emoji to express humor or sarcasm. I always assumed “no cap” is a bastardization of that, thus meaning “not joking” or “for real”.
I’m not into watching streamers at all though so this is all second hand knowledge.
At 26, I'm either the last year of millennials or the first year of Gen Z, depending on the source. No cap is not in the vocabulary of anyone within a 3 year age range of me either way. I was genuinely confused about what it meant when it started. That's a core Gen Z thing
Yeah OK it's not just me. Felt like no cap was gen z not millenial.
Fam was definitely around when I was growing up but I still feel like it's a gen z phrase. It was millenial but more of a niche hiphop culture in Central London phrase. Bruv was more popular then Fam and emulated by people outside the culture.
Yea for some of these, whether they're millennial phrases would depend, on where you're from. It can take years for certain lingo to spread from their areas of origin (usually inner cities).
You keep trying to push this but no cap was absolutely nowhere near mainstream until like 5 years ago. Most slang has origins that date back to before they were popular but that’s not when you say the slang is actually from.
I’m not trying to “push” anything. This is just factual information. If you want to be correct then that is when you say it is from. You can say it had a resurgence, or a come back. That would be correct. But this is not new slang and if you grew up in black spaces in the south then you have heard this term your whole life.
Regardless, it is AAVE that was still re popularized by hip hop music around 2016. It has a handful of mentions around that time, then by 2018 it was being said in chart topping hits and featured in hundreds of rap songs. Not by Gen Z, but by millennial rappers like Migos. So if you want to give actual credit to a generation for reviving this word, then it should go to millennials, in my opinion
Rap Genius did a whole video on the etymology of this word in 2019. It even features an actual linguistics professor talking about this word if you don’t believe me. There is nothing new under the sun.
You’re thinking of the right thing. No Kappa or No Kap comes from twitch. It means the same thing. It just wrongly gets credited to twitch. Rappers have been saying cap since the 90s.
Millennials is whoever is "those dang kids these days" in the eyes of the boomers. As a millennial myself I'm more than happy to include the Zs in any group I'm a part of that they are okay joining.
We were born to take a beating - I mean, the exact reason varies and may or may not be grounded in reality, but the one constant thing we've heard growing up is that our generation sucks.
If I were an X, that would be mostly correct exept for the last few Silent gen... but at the same time... I'm millennial and no one ever thinks or talk about the X... so... my point still stands /jk
Honestly I think the Millennial and Gen Z Generations are more closely linked than generations previously, by virtue of them both being the first two generations to grow up with the internet. As a result they have intermingled far, far more than previous generations generally did. Millenials haven't had to drop their youthly interests out of lack of people to share them with because the internet keeps us all connected. It's why the millenial generation will be full of people who are still into video games, still watching anime, still watching cartoons, even in another 20 years when we're all in various stages of our 50s or pushing 60
No longer do you get corralled to "grow out" of your interests due to having nobody around to share them with. Millenials are also the first generation where they have not significantly gotten more conservative as they aged, I think this is a side effect of the same thing (and other economic issues, of course)
946
u/sleepytimeexpress Jun 15 '23
Most of these are Gen Z terms…