What’s your question?
Is this the uncanny valley of dril tweets? I have no idea what this means
I also remember reading a tweet where someone said their young kid would whisper “like and subscribe” at bedtime like it was part of saying “goodbye”.
It’s bizarre.
My daughter, 8, wanted to send a birthday message to her grandma. We made the video, she sang happy birthday, and said “like and subscribe” at the end.
We did a second take without it.
Oof. And how about kids when some of their first words are “OK Googie” b/c the parents are always playing music on their smart speaker?
Thought it was clever marketing to disallow changing trigger phrases, but it’s actually child abuse! (OK not quite but it’s uncomfortable. I don’t even want a brand on my t-shirt, much less out of a relative’s mouth before they understand it.)
Doesn’t mean it makes sense. Isn’t that still just second person plural? “Chat” being using as a collective noun.
A collective noun is a word or phrase that refers to a group of people or things as one entity.
This isn’t some new-fangled youth speak breaking all the laws of language!!! It’s literally just…english. Leave it to the media to blow something way the fuck out of proportion to create unnecessary conversation around their stupid ass article.
Not really, because it’s the indeterminate group watching you. If you say “you” or “you all”, it’s referring to the people interacting with you, not the audience. You have to break the fourth wall to initiate that interaction and make it second person
But streamers sometimes will sometimes, mid conversation with someone else, say “chat, can you get me the link to that?” And continue talking to the other person while waiting for it. They’ll also say “chat is saying I should ask you about XYZ”.
It’s a specific relationship that straddles the line between a second person and third person. They’re also usually not included in first person plural
I see it on TikTok a lot, in the comments on a video that seems implausible. It’s sometimes someone genuinely asking the other commenters if the (whatever it was) is true. Other times people just use it to express astonishment.
Think of it as a replacement for “For real??”
First person = someone describing their own point of view (ex: I, me)
Second person = someone being addressed (ex: you, y’all)
Third person = someone talking about someone else (ex: they, them)
Fourth person = the point of view of a collective group (ex: we, us)
I can’t tell if you’re making a joke or not, but when I learned it “we” was first person plural. Likewise “y’all” was second person plural, etc.
The difference is that we as a first person plural is generally used for a more discrete group of people, but still from the perspective of a single narrator. Fourth person we is generally used for a collective of people with a shared perspective; there is no single narrator that is separate from the collective group, the entire group is there narrator. Fourth person is a concept that has only recently begun to be recognized as a distinct point of view.
If you believe in string perspective there are infinite narrators narrating each other’s narrations and we have only just started to make words for the infinities.
Bird Person = friend of Rick Sanchez and generally good guy who doesn’t appreciate dick moves
Fourth person
Doesn’t exist. We/us is first person plural. Some languages have a little complexity here (e.g. Tagalog has “kami” which means “we without you” and “tayo” which means “we with you,” but they’re both still first person plurals).
- first person - speaker
- second person - audience excluding speaker
- third person - everything else
Some linguists disagree and have recently begun accepting the existence of a fourth person point of view. Languages evolve, and I guess we’ll just have to see if it catches on and becomes more widely accepted in the future.
they are all constantly streaming, and they’ve crawled way, way down inside the Matrix
There are languages with a 4th person pronoun. The 3rd person is kind of the main character and the 4th someone else. That helps to disambiguate sentences like “The criminal shot the cop and drove away on his (own or the cop’s) bike”.
Or the “gay fanfiction problem”: “He looked at him and lay his hands on his lap”. Is it a happy ending or a sad one? That’s one theory why gender in pronouns is so resilient: more often than not, the gendered pronoun can disambiguate which person is talked about. It doesn’t always work, a 3rd/4rd person distinction is superior.
You can have an alternate third person pronoun I suppose in order to distinguish two third person individuals, but that doesn’t mean there’s a fourth person pronoun. The general definition is:
- first person - the speaker
- second person - the audience, whether present or not present
- third person - someone or something other than the audience
So things like “chat” and “breaking the fourth wall” are second person pronouns. There is no fourth person pronoun, because anything other than first and second is covered under third person.
I’ve looked it up and the official name is “obviative” and it is sometimes referred to as the “fourth person”.
That still sounds like a special type of third person, though I guess that’s just disagreeing about terminology.
Isn’t ‘chat’ essentially treated as a name, except that it refers to a group of people instead of an individual?
I think you’re right, and the pronoun for it would be the second person plural (you in English).
