#Yoink beeple series

Otherwise, this is basic taking and disposing. Speech is an act in itself, and these words are what imbue your physical movements with the exact intent that belongs to either - to brazenly filch something or emphatically rid yourself of it. There’s one where a kid’s dance moves are encouraged by peers shouting “yeet,” and, critical to this discussion, another in which a girl is given a beverage can, declares “this bitch empty,” and yeets it into a crowded school hallway. The current vogue for “yeet” is owed entirely to African-American Vernacular English, by way of a few iconic Vines. This gets us surprisingly close to a flipside for “yoink”: Instead of gathering in, you’re projecting out, expelling, launching. But “yeten,” like the 21st century “yeet,” was an incredibly versatile word - it might just as well mean “to overflow” or “to melt or dissolve.” Among its many alternative definitions, you also have “to send forth” and “to disperse or scatter.”

In the Middle English spoken in the first half of the second millennium, “yeet” was a form of the verb “yeten,” which could refer to the choice to address someone by the formal “ye” instead of the casual “thou.” It’s safe to say that this usage is extinct. “Yeet” is at once an older and newer coinage, and by far the more confounding.

#Yoink beeple series

For their part, The Simpsons writers have alluded to an onomatopoeic origin in earlier cartoon franchises “yoink” is the approximate transliteration of the sound cue for sudden theft in Hanna-Barbera series like Scooby-Doo (which also includes the interjection “zoinks”), and may have figured in Archie Comics as well. On the etymological side, its resemblance to “yank” can be no accident, and indeed it might be read as a goofy distortion of that verb. “Yoink” as we know it was established earlier, and with a more specific application - it entered public consciousness through The Simpsons, whose characters routinely deploy it in the act of snatching, grabbing or stealing an item, typically right out of someone else’s hands.Īlthough its roots are mysterious, “yoink” is the plausible synthesis of two antecedents. To answer that, we’ll first need to examine “yoink” and “yeet” in relative isolation. But does all this add up to a valid proof of their inverse definitions?Ī “yeet” is nature’s evolutionary response to the “yoink” They are, in a manner of speaking, both memes. Both words carry an implied exclamation point, and neither would be immediately comprehensible to an English speaker in the mid-20th century.

An economy of letters but a sharp divergence of sound. There’s a pleasing balance to the formulation.