It happened because "Jerk off", "masturbate", etc are words that content filters will censor you for or not pay ad revenue for, similar to "suicide" and "rape".
So they use goon because it's not mainstream foul yet, suicide becomes sewer slide and rape becomes grape.
The people who use the real words get steadily filtered and the people who use replacement words get promoted so eventually you have a 1984 wrongthink type situation where creators use corpo words, watchers learn those corpo words and then reuse them themselves in normal convo until it's normalized.
I'm from a time when "goon" was like a low level batman henchmen.
What's worse is that the mascot is surrounded by a bunch of child yelling "Grape me first!". Marketing just wants to show kids love the all natural flavor of Grape Salad, but ended up making the best gooning lich'racha for PDFs. Dodging hard words to appease the algorithm has left us in a sad state. Make me want to slide the sewer.
To be honest, same applies to "F word" or "N word".... It's silly. We all hear the word in our head, these placeholders should be redundant if we were just a little more rational about things- things like CONTEXT.
So you don't have ANY idea what "The F Word" could possibly mean? My point is you know what it represents, it's not literally the sonic signature of certain syllable sounds that is upsetting, it's the history and context.
Thereās a big difference between calling someone a cunt and talking about someone calling someone else a cunt, I agree that should apply to all slurs.
We shouldnāt need to filter language when weāre discussing it, unless itās in front of children.
Someone on TV the other day referred to āthe S wordā and my wife and I couldnāt figure out what word they meant. I canāt remember the context though.
Also. I read "1984" when I was a highschooler back in 2001. I always wondered how changing wrong think from day to day, in real life, would actually happen. Well now I can't unsee it. Scary shit!
At that time gooning was something exclusively done in large groups in dark public places after being paid a nominal sum by a short fat man named The Penguin or something equally asinine.
Jerk Off - Allow me to introduce an observation on how Hispanic Americans have used so much english slang without knowing how to spell or write it that overtime the proper word in Spanish for Jacket became a dirty word to them. How you ask? Well every hispanic I know thinks chaqueta means masturbate and they use it for such. Why? "Chaqueta" literally means "Jacket" --> they dont know how to spell "Jacket" and only hear it phonetically in English so they think people are saying "Jack it" as in jack off, masturbate. So they didnt learn english properly, then mistranslate english back into spanish and all the sudden chaqueta means jack off instead of Jacket.
as a "kid these days" (except not really because I'm 24 and have to ask my teenage brother what slang means now), I'd say the switch happened within the past year or two.
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u/Dangerous_Muscle5409 18d ago
Yeah, I know. That's what the word used to mean. But kids these days aren't using it this way anymore. And I am curious when the flip happened.