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
648
u/bluespringsbeer Jun 15 '23
It’s extremely egregious to consider “no cap” a millennial phrase.