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## #aintnobodygottimeforthat: cultural appropriation, stylization and the social life of hashtag interjectionality

Anne H. Fabricius Roskilde University fabri@ruc.dk

As a keystroke it neither means nor adds anything, and yet the hashtag restructures all language - or what is le ft of it. Benjamin Burdick, #hashtag (2014)

Abstract: Th is paper will discuss a particular hashtag meme as one example of a potential new manifestation of interjectionality , engendered and fostered in the written online context of social media. Th e case derives from a video meme and hashtag from the United States which 'went viral' in 2012. We will ask to what extent hashtags might perform interjectional-type functions over and  above  their  referential  functions,  thereby  having  links  to  other,  more prototypically  interjectional  elements. Th e  case  will  also  be  discussed  from multiple sociolinguistic perspectives: as an example of the (indirect) signifying of  'whiteness'  through  'black'  discourse,  as  cultural  appropriation  in  the context of potential policing of these racial divides in the United States, and as  a  case  of  performative  stylization  which  highlights  grammatical  markers while simultaneously downplaying phonological markers of African American English. We will end by speculating as to the implications of the rise of (variant forms of) hashtags for processes of creative language use in the future. 1

## 1. Introduction

Th is  paper is concerned theoretically with one example of the kinds of linguistic creativity aff  orded by new technological developments, based on the idea that a social media tool such as Twitter has opened up the arena of what it is possible for language users to do in the realm of interjectionality. I use the term 'hashtag interjectionality' specifi  cally as an innovative use of the hashtag. Th is interjectionality is a creative use that moves the hashtag beyond being a simple sorting  too,  which  was  its  original  designed  purpose.  Many  writers have noted the rise of enregistered 'internet language' forms (Squires 2010). Th e hashtag has also recently become a way of referencing social movements and trends (#MeToo, for example), and, I argue here, moving into the realm of interjectionality and the forceful expression of feeling is also a natural step.

We will base this discussion around the idea of a continuum of interjectionality (following Ameka 1992 and Stange 2009, 2016), the idea that expressions can be  more  or  less  'interjectional' ,  fl  uctuating  between  levels  of  'emotiveness' vis-à-vis levels of 'cognitive content' (see further in section 3 below). In the era of the hashtag, and contra Burdick above, we will claim that the hashtag does of course 'mean' something, indeed, can mean and do many things, and has  demonstrated  its  potential  as  a  linguistic  device. Th e  paper  will  focus empirically  on  a  family  of  hashtags  we  characterize  as  the  #aintnobody… family,  which  is  at  time  of  writing  a  meme  with  about  six  years  of  history behind it. As such, it is not particularly special in itself: it has lived a mundane life  and  not  been  part  of  a  spectacular  social  movement  the  way  #MeToo, #TimesUp  and  #BlackLivesMatter  have  done.  It  fi  ts  into  a  middle  range, neither being one of the very fi  rst instances of hashtags (the type emerged in 2007); nor is it brand new. As a meme in 'middle age' it seems to have proven to have a certain amount of staying power and has thus attained a kind of ' every-day-ness' , which makes it suitable to serve as an example of the kinds of broadly sociolinguistic processes this paper will illustrate as being at play in social media usages of hashtags.

Th e present paper will therefore discuss this hashtag (and its family of variants) from several perspectives. To begin with, I will present relevant theoretical approaches  to interjectionality ,  (following  Stange  (2016,  2009)  and  Ameka 1992), a key theoretical concept here that emphasizes gradability rather than absolutist defi  nitions of what makes interjections the special part of speech they are (as discussed in Ameka 1992). Th e essence of my theoretical claim in this paper is that we can fi  nd similarities and echoes between hashtags and the structural and, especially, functional, classes of interjections and interjectional phrases. Th e particular example presented here shows tantalizing relations to several features of interjections as a pragmatic class. Although the parallel is not perfect, it does reinforce the view that there is a place in the literature for a foregrounding of degrees of interjectionality aff  ecting various pieces of linguistic form in the (relatively) new 'written language' arena of social media (see also the other papers in this journal issue).

A ft er these theoretical refl  ections, I will consider other more sociolinguistic aspects  of  this  particular  hashtag. Th ere  are  several  that  I  fi  nd  particularly interesting, so the case will be discussed from multiple perspectives, as noted above.  For  example,  the  tag  itself  mediates  and  semiotizes  race  politics  in the  United  States  in  a  particular  way.  We  will  thus  consider  the  tag  as  an example of (indirect) indexicality of 'whiteness' through 'black' discourse (in the manner identifi  ed by Jane Hill in 1999). Secondly, it can be seen as an instance of cultural appropriation within this context of the potential policing of  racial  diversity  and  race  in  the  United  States,  as  several  commentators have noted. Th e other interesting angle is that a specifi  c phonetic stylization process (Coupland 2007), using varying degrees of 'bleaching' of the written form is a central part of this semiosis, even in the face of the possibility of the repeated performance of the original clip which is enabled by the video meme technology that permeates social media. To conclude, I will urge that, in line with many other streams of scholarship, we need to focus on degrees rather  than  absolutes  -  moving  the  analytical  focus  from  interjections  to shades of interjectionality. Combining that particular analytical move with a sensitivity to the social semiotic levels that any instance of novel language use can construct will enable innovative types of linguistic performance such as these data examples to be understood more fully.

## 2. Th e data

Th e example case derives from a video meme and hashtag originating in the United States, which subsequently 'went viral' in 2012. Th e original news clip from  which  it  derives  is  from  an  interview  with  Kimberley  'Sweet  Brown' Wilkins,  the  resident  of  an  apartment  building  that  had  caught  fi  re. Th e interview was originally broadcast on KFOR-TV in Oklahoma City, on April 8, 2012.

Wilkins' own dramatic escape from the burning building is related to the news interviewer as a short narrative. Kimberley Wilkins performs this monologue in  a  basilectal  form  of  AAVE,  with  many linguistic features of that type of speech. Th e monologue in full is transcribed here:

Voiceover: One resident describes her horrifying experience when she fi  rst realised the complex was on fi  re

Kimberley Wilkins: Well, I woke up to go get me a cold pop and then I thought somebody was barbecuin' . I said 'Oh Lord Jesus it's a fi  re' and then I ran out, I didn't grab no shoes or nothin' Jesus I ran for my life. And then the smoke got me, I got bronchitis. Ain't nobody got time for that.

Source: Web1.

Th e interviewee's fi  nal utterance, o ft en transcribed as 'ain't nobody got time fo' dat' became a much-quoted stereotyped fragment from the episode and, as commonly happened at that time, an auto-tune version of the interview by the Parody Factory emerged soon a ft er, also in April 2012 (Web2).

Various versions of the written tag can now be found on Twitter:

#aintnobodygottimefodat

#aintnobodygottimefordat

#aintnobodygottimefothat

As well as the form used in the title here:

#aintnobodygottimeforthat

Th ere  is  also  an  existing  acronym  form  #angt ft (as  well  as  #angtfd)  which seems to have emerged at the same time as the longer form of the hashtag, according to Twitter archives online.

In  terms  of  rates  of  usage,  a  simple  Google  search  on  26 th February  2018 revealed that the various forms yielded diff  erent numbers of hits:

| #aintnobodygottimeforthat   |   123000 |
|-----------------------------|----------|
| #aintnobodygottimefothat    |     3810 |
| #aintnobodygottimefordat    |     5460 |
| #aintnobodygottimefodat     |     4410 |
| #angtft                     |      811 |

Table 1. Forms and Google 'hits' for the #aintnobody… family of hashtags, February 2018.

In  terms  of  its  subsequent  quotation  and  re-usage,  at  time  of  writing,  the hashtag seems to be used most commonly to express a range of emotional responses. It appears most commonly as an expression of frustration at time wasted, or of eff  ort wasted, on the part of self and other people. Annoyances of other kinds can also feature. It seems also to be used commonly in connection with illness on the part of the speaker/writer, such as infl  uenza or bronchitis (which was part of the original interview, so this may be a case of more extensive quotation), for example during the winter months. Note that in the Urbandictionary.com defi  nition of the acronym form, it is glossed as 'especially useful when time is short' (Web3).

In other cases, the hashtag seems to express refl  ective bemusement at, or a general sense of detachment from or unwillingness to engage with, the topic of the tweet. It is also commonly used to express anger at and rejection of other people's  actions. Th e  examples  given  below  are  all  from  diff  erent  tweeters. Note however that example (d) also seems more 'contentful' , because it spells out the implicitness of the (…) a ft er 'the building of IKEA furniture' . 2

- a. It' s funny how I can look at dogs and be all. 'omg I want one!' but when it comes to kids, I may think they're cute but never do I say that I want one. J #AintNobodyGotTimeFor Th at
- b. You know you're old when you ask someone what 'starting a streak' means and what the point of it was. #AintNobodyGotTimeFor Th at
- c.  I don't get how some people can be two-faced hypocrites #AintNobodyGotTimeFor Th at
- d.   Love IKEA furniture. However, the building of IKEA furniture.... #AintNobodyGotTimeFor Th at
- e.  Life is too short to eat olives with pips in #AintNobodyGotTimeFor Th at

Th us, we can see in the meanings of the emotional responses expressed by this hashtag a sense of the perception of something negative, either within oneself or in one's own experience, or deriving from other people, that is emphatically rejected by the use of the hashtag. Th ese and similar emotive usages provided the primary impetus for looking at this hashtag as a potential interjectionlike utterance, exhibiting some degrees of interjectionality. Th is terminological and theoretical discussion will be the focus of the next section.

## 3. Interjections and interjectionality

Ameka's  classic  1992  paper  on  interjections  classifi  cation  distinguishes between interjections, which are single bounded utterances, and interjectional phrases, which are more complex utterances made up of items that can also appear in other contexts. His classifi  cation scheme would put the #aintnobody… family into the class of interjectional phrases, since they fulfi  l  the  criterion  of  being  'multi-word  expressions,  phrases,  which  can be free utterance units and refer to mental acts' (Ameka 1992: 111). Th ey are most clearly examples of 'completive or exclamatory utterances' (1992: 104). Like Ameka, we do not label these hashtag forms 'interjections' proper, but reserve that term for shorter, less complex utterances. We will prefer to suggest that these hashtags are 'interjectional' and 'display interjectionality' to some degree.

We can note that longer syntactic structures shortened to acronyms are also interesting in themselves, although there is not scope in this paper to delve deeply into this. #angt ft can be said to function as a pointer to the full form, and it is an example of the mode of internet writing that is now commonplace (cf. '#MAGA' , Trump's campaign slogan from 2016 and other older 'leet speak' abbreviations such as 'ff  s' = 'for fuck's sake' , 'fwiw' = 'for what it's worth' , 'wtf ' = 'what the fuck' and so on. See also Squires 2010 for further discussion of this mode of writing and its enregisterment).

Interjectionality ,  as  a  complex  of  features  and  functions  that  an  utterance can have more or less of, or be used with more or less of, was introduced in  Nübling  (2004)  and  has  been  explicated  by  Nübling  and  Stange  in  a series  of  publications.  Stange  (2009:  31)  for  instance  refers  to  'parameters of interjectionality' - and in her 2016 study, Stange (2016:17) explicates her approach to determining the degree of interjectionality of an utterance:

'an interjection is said to exhibit a high degree of interjectionality if

1. It is primarily emotive
2. It is exclamatory
3. It does not require an addressee
4. It is produced semi-automatically. '

By means of this model, she sets up a continuum (in her fi  gure 2.2, based on Nübling (2004:18)) between the highest and lowest degrees of interjectionality, where a scale from emotive to cognitive to conative to phatic interjections moves  from  the  highest  to  the  lowest  degree  of  interjectionality,  as  the interjections vary along the parameters described in 1 through 4 above.

Our data examples (a, b, c, d, e above) seem to most clearly fulfi  l the criteria for interjectionality in the fi  rst three cases. Th e #aintnobody tags are clearly expressive of emotion and exclamatory. Th e tags seem to be just as much used as a reply to other tweets on Twitter as they are used in solo tweets that are not addressed to anyone else (although no large quantitative study of this has been carried out). In these cases the hashtags simply accompany personal private musings on a topic, and so they are not dependent on a specifi  c addressee but,  in  the  way  of  social  media  at  large,  utterances  can  be  simply  'put  out there' ,  addressed  to  the  public  audience  at  large. Th e  degree  to  which  the tags can be regarded as spontaneous outbursts and thus 'semi-automatic' in Stange and Nübling's terms is more diffi cult to ascertain in a written medium, simply because of the asynchronous nature of tweeting as a language practice. Certainly, the tag's usages could be said, prima facie, to be based on diff  erent degrees of refl  ection. We can ask, given the content they report on, is the use in (a.) above more 'refl  ective' and less semi-automatic than (e.) or (c.), where refl  ection on a person's attitude to having children could be seen as a more considered emotion than the immediate frustration of eating olives with pips, and reaction to that experience more or less 'in the moment' as expressed in the tweet or spontaneous anger at other people's hypocrisy? While we cannot at all determine with accuracy how 'automatic' the reaction expressed in any one tweet was, there can also be more or less surprising tweet connections made between topics and the hashtag, but exploring this in more detail is outside the scope of this paper.

Other linguists have started to investigate hashtags in use and tried to defi  ne their  semantic  and  pragmatic,  as  well  as  formal  and  functional  properties. Hashtags seems to cover many functions, but the interjectional function is defi  nitely there in those accounts. Scott (2015), for instance, takes a relevance theory-perspective and claims that 'the role of hashtags has developed beyond their original purpose (as metadata tags, ed.), and […] they now also function to guide readers' interpretations' (Scott 2015: 8). Hashtags, she argues, give contextually  relevant  information  that  helps  readers  fi  nd  their  way  to  the intended  interpretation  in  a  discourse  context  (such  as  social  media)  that is large and dynamic and to some extent discursively unpredictable, also in terms of scalability, with the potential of individual tweets to reach millions of readers.

Norrick's (2009) approach to interjections also gives a promising perspective for this paper. His claim that interjections are a large and open-ended functional class  of  utterances  seems  particularly  appealing  here,  where  we  are  seeing pieces of linguistic form take on a role as emotion-expressers, with greater and lesser degrees of the kinds of characteristics that make up 'interjectionality' as we have been using the term here. It opens the door for hashtags to fulfi  l this particular interactional role, and that is what we are claiming has happened with the #aintnobody… hashtags.

## 4. #Aintnobody… and race politics in the United States

Two  overriding  political  themes  can  be  taken  up  in  connection  to  the #aintnobody…  hashtags. Th e  fi  rst  concerns  its  semiosis  of  race  and  racial divides  in  the  United  States,  and  the  second  concerns  aspects  of  cultural appropriation. Th ese two are ultimately intertwined and have echoes to other racial diversity problematics in the same context, as will be discussed below. Two commentators that I am aware of have raised issues of uncomfortableness around the spread and continued usage of the #aintnobody… tags, and these issues were raised quite quickly a ft er the meme's initial dissemination in April 2012. 3

In  2013,  Sesali  Bowen  wrote  a  blog  post  condemning  the  cultural  appropriation by the white majority in the United States of certain elements of underprivileged  black  women's  experience  (o ft en  suitably  sanitized)  under the rubric of 'ratchet culture' . Th e 'Sweet Brown' #aintnobody… memes were placed in this category. Bowen's argument is that these examples (including the  Miley  Cyrus  'twerk'  phenomenon  that  was  the  original  impetus  for her  commentary)  are  an  expression  of  cultural  appropriation  of  aspects of  (female)  black  lived  experience  into  the  white  world,  essentially  for  the purposes of selling something. As she writes 'It is super easy to borrow from the experiences of others as a way to be 'fun, ' or stretch boundaries on what is 'acceptable, ' without any acknowledgement of context or framework. ' She claims that

'ratchet works to simultaneously police and defy gender, class, sexuality, and respectability norms. Folks with certain privilege are willing and able to fl  oat in and out of ratchet at will' .

Th is  move  between  association  and  disassociation  with  features  of  black women's  experience  is  however  not  available  to  all,  but,  the  writer  claims, only to certain types of (non-black) privilege. Black people on the other hand (and perhaps especially black women) will be read through the lens of their race and its aff  ordances and limitations at all times. Th e author argues that using a hashtag meme that originates from dramatic negative circumstances, transforming  it  with  humorous  or  mocking  intent  constitutes  therefore  an illegitimate act of appropriation (Bowen 2013).

In a slightly diff  erent vein, in October 2013, Charles E. Williams wrote on the topic for the Huffi ngton post (Williams 2013). He writes that he had himself admired the honesty and unguarded language in the original interview, but had also speculated as to whether reacting with humour to the depiction of tragic events (such as a house fi  re) using such unmonitored black community language constituted a racist stance on the part of white observers. Williams argues that it is best if 'quite frankly this kind of dialect and the humour it sometimes  encourages  stays  in  the  confi  nes  of  my  cultural  community' (Williams is an African-American Baptist pastor). He quotes W .E.B. du Bois, who wrote in 'Souls of Black Folks' from 1903: 'It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity' . Th is consciousness of othering, Williams argues, leads him to be nervous in public contexts of revealing his own (basilectal) African American Vernacular English, knowing as he does what it can lead to of judgmental attitudes and consequences. Th e empowered conclusion he ends with, however, is that this language and its authenticity ought to be an object of pride, even in the face of mainstream condemnation or rejection, a point that has been very familiar to sociolinguists at least since, for example, the publication of Labov 1969.

Th e fact remains that the #aintnobody… hashtags provoke diff  erent responses for  diff  erent  readers,  and  the  political  backdrop  to  what  is  for  some  a seemingly innocuous internet meme is by no means straightforward. As Susan Gal has written (2018: 9), the use of a register of language (such as African American Vernacular English) is always 'a response to other ways of naming the  phenomenon:  essentially  dialectic' . Th e  hashtag  bears  something  of  its original context, and the phonetic details of the way it was uttered with it on its travels, particularly when snippets of the original video and audio can be circulated endlessly on the internet. Moreover, as Gal points out, 'participants enact speaker types by using register fragments conventionally linked to such person typifi  cations' (Gal 2018: 5), so as the enactment of a speaker type who provokes mockery and humour, the 'Sweet Brown' typifi  cation carries on in each discursive iteration, making its usage, as Bowen also claims, a political act marking and policing a racial divide.

Jane Hill, in a series of publications (eg. Hill 1999) has indeed shed light on the tendency of white mainstream culture in the United States to appropriate the  language  of  others.  She  claims  that  'white  public  space  is  constructed partly through intense monitoring of the speech of racialized populations… for  signs  of  linguistic  disorder' .  Her  cases  mainly  concerned  Latino/Latina language  forms,  which  are  commonly  appropriated  and  reframed  within white discourses. Hill's condemnation of the practice centres on the fact that such stylizations carry with them an assumption of 'white public space' being the normatively unmarked order, in a dialectic juxtaposition, as Gal would also claim. Th is  mechanism of contrast, I maintain, can be seen at work in the #aintnobody… hashtags as well. We will see further the ways in which this racial political context is worked with in the following section, which will discuss phonetic stylization and variations in orthographic 'mainstreaming' .

## 5. Phonetic Stylization in #aintnobody tags

In  section  two  above,  we  showed  the  various  forms  in  which  the  hashtag occurs online: 4

#aintnobodygottimeforthat

#aintnobodygottimefothat

#aintnobodygottimefordat

#aintnobodygottimefodat

#angt ft Th e details of the stylizations involved in the spelling of these tags are complex: 'ain't nobody' occurs in all instances, and its implied contrast is with standard 'nobody has' , without the negative concord of 'ain't nobody' . ' Ain't' in itself is a much-stigmatized verbal auxiliary, standing grammatically in place of 'isn't' , 'aren't' or 'hasn't, haven't (depending on grammatical context). But 'ain't' and the negative concord with 'nobody' remain in all the manifestations of the hashtag, apart from the acronymic form.

Th e  other  variations  at  the  end  of  the  hashtag  show  evidence  of  a  gradual 'bleaching out' of the spelling of the particular AAVE/Southern phonological features that are present in the original performance. 'Fo dat' shows both nonrhoticity  ('fo'  for  'for'),  typical  both  of  AAVE  and  traditional  Southern  US English,  and  DH-stopping, common in AAVE and for instance, New York traditional  speech  ('d'  for  the  voiced  interdental  fricative).  '..Fordat'  retains DH-stopping and retains rhoticity, and '...fothat' does the reverse: maintaining the non-rhotic 'fo' and using standard 'that' instead of the stopped version, ' dat' . ' ...Forthat' , the form which as we noted in section two garners the highest numbers of Google hits and thus seems to be the most commonly used form, has fully standardized the phonological variation while keeping the two signs of  grammatical  variation,  'aint'  and  negative  concord. Th e  most  common form is now the most phonologically 'mainstreamed' form. Th e fi  nal form in our list, a completely reduced acronym, in the style of many internet terms which likewise have been reduced to initials, carries with it no visible signs of phonetic stylization (although there is also a marked form #angtfd which seems to be mostly used by the black twitter community, at fi  rst glance).

Following  Nikolas  Coupland  (2007),  we  can  see  these  written  forms  as carrying  with  them  various  degrees  and  types  of  linguistic  stylization. Coupland writes extensively on this phenomenon, which involves either oral or written performance of a style which sticks out, which marks itself literally as the 'marked' item of a dialectical pair that contrasts an upholding of and a breaking of language norms. Coupland claims that 'speakers design their talk in the awareness - at some level of consciousness and with some level of  autonomous control - of alternative possibilities  and  of  likely  outcomes (2007: 146). ' His further elaboration of stylization makes the following points (2007:154):

- Stylisation  is  therefore  fundamentally  metaphorical.  It  brings  into play stereotyped semiotic and ideological values associated with other groups, situations or times. It dislocates a speaker and utterances from the immediate speaking context.
- It  is  refl  exive,  mannered  and  knowing.  It  is  a  metacommunicative mode  that  attends  and  invites  attention  to  its  own  modality,  and

radically  mediates  understanding  of  the  ideational,  identifi  cational and relational meanings of its own utterances.

- It requires an acculturated audience able to read and predisposed to judge the semiotic value of a projected persona or genre. It is therefore especially tightly linked to the normative interpretations of speech and non-verbal styles entertained by specifi  c discourse communities.
- It  instigates,  in  and  with  listeners,  processes  of  social  comparison and  re-evaluation  (aesthetic  and  moral),  focused  on  the  real  and metaphorical  identities  of  speakers,  their  strategies  and  goals,  but spilling over into re-evaluation of listeners' identities, orientations and values.

Especially  interesting  are  the  comments  on  the  fact  that  stylisation  as  a metacommunicative mode requires a 'knowing audience' .  Interestingly,  the reproduction possibilities of video and audio memes mean that global knowing audiences can constantly be created anew on the internet as it functions today, without the need for such pre-existing cultural (or sub-cultural) knowledge.

If  we  combine  Coupland's  theorizing  of  stylization  with  Gal's  theory  of register in a linguistic anthropological light and Hill's discussion of language appropriations  that  position  speakers  and  performers  as  more  or  less mainstream, we have a powerful set of tools to understand the internet hashtag #aintnobodygottimeforthat  and  its  other  family  members.  A ft er  the  initial positioning of this instance of speech as nonstandard, nonmainstream and stigmatized,  it  has  become  normalized  into  mainstream  discourse  through orthographic bleachings (ultimately, all the way to an acronym) that remove evidence of non-standard phonology. Th e internet being what it is, the visual and phonetic qualities of the original clip still lurk in the background, and are  indeed  revived  from  time  to  time,  to  bring  back  the  racial  and  social marking of the tag and tying it to its original performance. But in its new position, which has brought it to the edge of the 'interjectionality' universe, as the examples in section two showed, spelling variations have made it more mainstream, more 'non-AAVE' and more used in the social media universe as  an  informal  emotive  interjection,  more  mundane  and,  potentially,  more lasting and mainstream.

## 6. Conclusions

Th is  paper  has  dealt  with  the  horizon  of  new  linguistic  openings  that technological developments aff  ord in social media contexts such as Twitter. Interjectionality as a shaded area, a case of degree rather than absolute, has been a major focus here. Th e #aintnobody… family is not particularly special in itself, but it has attained a kind of 'every-day-ness' . At the same time, as an instance of sociolinguistically interesting semiosis, it opens up a discussion of white privilege and markedness in the context of the social and racial diversity in language in the United States. It serves as an interesting example of creativity and play in hashtags with burgeoning interjectional power. It remains to be seen to what extent these types processes persist and continue to innovate, but at present, we see no reason to expect limits on the creativity of hashtags in the future.

## Notes

- 1 I  thank the editors of this volume, Carsten Levisen, Eva Ska ft e Jensen and Tina Th ode Hougaard for organizing a very fruitful 'Interjection Day' at Roskilde University on 11 th October 2017, where this paper was fi  rst presented as a contribution to a workshop on 'Interjections and New Media' . I also owe thanks to the helpful  input  from an anonymous reviewer who provided the impetus for revisions that moved the research process forward during 2018. My biggest thanks go to my daughter Rebecca Fabricius, a digital native and a skilled and artistic social media user, who was the fi  rst to alert me to the #angt ft meme, and who delightedly shared my interest in it with her friends, in true collaborative twenty-fi  rst century style.
- 2 Th is case also seems parallel to the ironic 'not so much' (also found as a hashtag #notsomuch) that is listed on Urban Dictionary and found on social media.
- 3 Note also that Kimberley 'Sweet Brown' Wilkins sued Apple Corporation in April 2013 for unauthorized use of her words in a song produced for profi  t on iTunes.
- 4 A more detailed quantitative and qualitative comparison of the contexts of use of these diff  erent hashtag variants in corpus twitter data is beyond the scope of the present paper but would be a natural extension of the present work.

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- Web2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waEC-8GFTP4.
- Web3: https://www.urbandictionary.com/defi  ne.php?term=ANGTFT.