Here it is, the dawn of "bae," word of indiscriminate origin and now 1/4 of the title in the new Pharrell and Miley Cyrus music video. "Come Get It, Bae" is here to trample your ears at your next barbecue, even though nobody really knows what "bae" is or where "bae" came from.
Really, even the dictionary isn't sure where to go from here. But we'll get to that in a second.
I embarked on a small informational quest to find out just why all the kids are calling their kid boyfriends and girlfriends "bae," and I'm still not sure if I know.
One day, like you, receding into the depths of the Facebooks and Twitters, I began to see sporadic "I love you bae" and "#BaeBeLike" and "Thanks Bae" and "#BAEcation" messages. My mind immediately rejected them. What is this? And why does everyone seem to know about it but me?
When I first saw the word "bae," I assumed, tragically and incorrectly, that it was yet another derivative of Beyoncé. She is known for her impressive musical riffs, epic hair flips, and power struts, among other things, so this offered a reasonable progression, in my eyes. Maybe this was another way to show she was ruling the world, by adding a letter to her nickname and subtly dropping this into 20 percent of America's texts from boyfriend to girlfriend, full-on NSA style?
Next, in one of my less than proud moments, I thought it might be a new shorthand way of calling someone—affectionately (insofar as a once demeaning term can become affectionate)—a bitch. Again, way off the mark.
I then endeavored to fill in the blanks of an acronym that did not exist.
Batting All Eyelashes? (Action to accompany each declaration of love?) Brave As (An) Eagle? (Continued American pride in honor of our World Cup performance?) Born After Egalitarianism? (Everybody's got a right to love.) Bacon And Eggs? (Doesn't really make sense, but simultaneously makes tons of sense. My personal favorite.)
Despite my efforts, none of these sounded particularly plausible. Similar to the days of yore when I hastened to remedy my initial ignorance of the meaning of NSFW, MCM, WCW, TBT (Nobody shaves for Wendy! Man, cougar, mammoth, woman, cannibal, wallaby—try and be tested!) and the like, I finally buckled. I was headed to the modern equivalent of the classic Oxford English Dictionary – the Internet's infinitely knowledgeable social guide, Urban Dictionary.
"Bae," Urban Dictionary says, is an acronym that stands for "before anyone else," or a shortened version of baby or babe, another word for sweetie, and, mostly unrelated, poop in Danish. In addition, "bae" has appeared in rap songs and countless web memes since the mid-2000's.
Look, I'm all for contemporary conveniences and adapting to your medium/audience, but "bae" may be in the extreme get-the-fk-out-of-here phrase arena. This may be a step too far. Is it really that much harder to say babe than "bae"? Plus, are descriptions such as actual proper names and the words best friend, lover, irreplaceable, incomparable, etc. no longer good enough?
While it might at first sound alarmingly like irritating, incomprehensible tween-speak to some (and I confess, that was my initial reaction), it is actually much more widespread and pervasive so as not to warrant a hasty dismissal. The meteoric rise in popularity of the word "bae" in recent months has galvanized my resolve to experiment with it, for the sake of progress. Is it staying around?
I spoke briefly with Katherine Connor Martin, head of U.S. Dictionaries at Oxford University Press, about the sudden spike in "bae's" popularity.
"It's an amazing thing for lexicographers in this day and age, with things like Twitter—such unredacted, unedited speech—to see [words gaining in notoriety] in real time, as it offers a written record of what was once just oral slang," she said. "Slang is often very transient, first appearing in subcultures, and then tends to be proliferated online. It's usually difficult to predict which words will break through."
Just like with "bitch"—scientific to slur to term of endearment (sort of, sometimes)—word usage evolves. That's the beauty of language and culture. But how far do we allow it to go before it just becomes silly, counterintuitive and partially damaging to effective means of expression? Where's the poetry?
So I asked my sister, a fellow twenty-something, for her thoughts. Her response: "Smdh (shaking my damn head, for those still taking lessons). Who the eff comes up with this stuff? Stupidest ish I've ever heard." Blunt? Definitely. Ironic? Yep.
Back to the dictionary, then: Will it ever reach the honored status of staples such as lol, omg and brb?
"Bae seems to be having a moment—take Pharrell's song, "Come Get It Bae," or Katy Steinmetz's recent piece for Time, for example.
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Oxford has a tracking corpus to identify things that are trending upward – and we have noticed a spike in bae since January of this year," according to Connor Martin. "It hasn't achieved a permanent mark on the linguistic record quite yet. We normally wait for it to make a mark through a variety of sources before it's up for consideration for Oxford Dictionaries Online. (ODO is the more current chronicle of words than the historical record, OED).
Look, is it making the dictionary? It's making the dictionary, right?
"Bae's ascendance could happen very quickly. It appears to be having its inflection point right now, and it will be interesting to see if it continues to pick up speed, or if becoming too widespread will damage its social reputation in the coming months," she said.
Sounds like a hard maybe. A cautious yes for intermittent usage, out of the mouths of baes.
