Have you noticed how the kids are saying “low key” a lot these days? I don’t mean in the traditional meaning of “mellow,” but something a little subtler.
“I low key don’t really want to do this.” “She low key isn’t that great a singer.”
The new “low key” says “I don’t want to push too hard on this, but. …” I suspect it will be making it onto lists of the year’s slang (such as likely here!) as if it’s just some lexical bauble. But there is more to it than that. “Lowkey” — I will render it that way because it’s really one word — is a symptom of English filling out, like an inflatable bed.
“Lowkey” crept into the mainstream in the early 2020s, but I sense it as especially entrenched as of this year. As with so much youth argot in our times, this new use has its origins in how Black English had already remodeled “low key.” In that dialect, it has meant “under the radar,” as in a spicy fiction book series aimed at Black women titled “Low Key Fallin’ for a Savage.” It’s a short step from “under the radar” to the current meaning of “If I may tell the truth. …”
To get why this is fun, we need to look at languages in general. A great many of them pack more shades of meaning into a word, or sentence, than English does.
In Cantonese, “Māt fānbiht ge je bo!” means “What’s the difference!” The three short words “ge je bo” at the end each contribute a bit of implication. The “ge” affirms a fact. The “je” means “And what’s the big deal anyway?” The “bo” solicits agreement, as in “Ya’ know?” In English, we’d convey all of that with tone, gestures, facial expressions — but in Cantonese it’s also in those little wordlets.
In Navajo, if someone says “I told you to get those Christmas lights down from the closet shelf!,” to answer “I’m taking them down!” you might answer “Nahi‘diishlé!” In that one word, the “hi” part gets in the detail you didn’t need to specify, that you are taking the strings of light down one at a time. The “iish” part means not just “take,” but more specifically that you’re taking things shaped like a rope. To wit: If a woman said “Nahi‘diishlé!” when you couldn’t see her, you’d know she was handling things shaped like a rope!
English has plenty of subtleties, but it’s not as particular and explicit as Cantonese and Navajo in being so. The reason lies in the past when, as I mentioned recently, Vikings learned English upon invading Britain and left out the stuff that was harder for them to learn. The result was Old English with a close shave, and it takes eons for a language to get back up to what we might call par. Languages like Cantonese and Navajo have been allowed, like most languages, to just overgrow forever. Although “lowkey” looks like something cute and/or trivial, it is exactly the way a language fills out. “Lowkey” gives us some Cantonese “ge je bo” action.
So “lowkey” is not just a slang term, but also part of a process. Not only in terms of grammar but in culture, too, in that it starts with a Black English expression and runs with it. One view from the left sees this kind of thing as linguistic theft, with the mainstream usage of “lowkey” a kind of appropriation from Blackness. I see a different story.
English is being fattened back up — and to a large degree by a dialect that is ever more America’s youth lingua franca, ever pouring new stuff into how everybody talks.
Think, too, of the “bronoun.” Listen to young’uns using “bro” in sentences like “Bro thinks he looks good in that shirt” or “Bro needs to leave her alone or she’s gonna go off on him.” Once again, it starts with a Black English thing, “Bro” as a term of address meaning “buddy.” Mainstream English picked that meaning up long ago — the “Bruh” thing. But this new bronoun is something beyond that. A Martian linguist would beam down and hear this new “bro” as a special version of “he” that conveys something quite particular: affectionate dismissal. It’s like — stay with me — Vietnamese. Vietnamese often uses the word “hắn” as a way of saying “he” when the speaker disapproves of the subject. It is more outright condemnatory than our bronoun, but the spirit is similar.
And there’s more. Both “lowkey” and the bronoun are, in the end, buffers. “Lowkey” deflects intensity. The new “bro” criticizes, but with a compensatory warm grin. The notoriously ubiquitous “like” is similar. It’s a warm thing, stepping away from pushing too hard.
The thing is that American English hasn’t always been as “no worries!” as it is now. Linguists like to show that there has always been colloquial as well as formal speech, that ultimately there is little new under the sun. But I cannot see that the way Americans talked colloquially before about 1980 was as casually but studiously deferent as it is today. I’ve read courtroom transcriptions from the Gaslight Era, read voluminous word-for-word transcriptions of young people talking at length in California in the 1960s and listened to recordings of middle-class white folk talking in therapy sessions in the same era. In no peek-ins at how people actually talked in the past have I seen the degree of accommodation typical of ordinary American speech now, where to be socially acceptable is to not push too terribly hard.
Why did colloquial American become more accommodating after 1980?
I venture that it’s about diversity.
That is, even amid friendly circumstances, difference encourages a kind of caution.
First, contact between white and Black kids has vastly increased since the 1960s. Also, the Immigration Act of 1965 brought people from the world over into America. Their children started coming of age in the 1980s. Americans increasingly grew up in multihued cohorts with distinct life experiences. This may have encouraged a certain subconscious but powerful linguistic politesse as a path to bonding.
That’s what I hear in “lowkey.” Ask “Where does this ‘lowkey’ come from?” and my answer is: Respect.
