Arnold Zwicky's Blog

The One Big Happy from the 8th:

(Thanks to John Baker — see the comments — this is a good copy of the cartoon, to replace the Denver Post version, sent to me by Benita Bendon Campbell, in the first draft of this posting. GoComics will eventually release the strip on-line.)

Bonnie’s comment:

“So on fleek” is news to me.

Well, it’s genuinely recent.

NOAD is on the case:

adj. fleek: (usually in phrase on fleek) US informal extremely good, attractive, or stylish: my hair is on fleek right now | OMG the music is on fleek | have you ever seen anything so fleek in your life? ORIGIN early 21st century: apparently an arbitrary formation; popularized in a 2014 video post on the social media service Vine by Kayla Newman (‘Peaches Monroee’).

And from the Know Your Meme site:

On June 21st, 2014, Viner Peaches Monroee uploaded a video in which she speaks to the camera while sitting in a car and announces that her eyebrows are “on fleek” … In the first five months, the video gained over 20 million plays, 492,000 likes and 411,000 revines.

Stuff moves far and fast. But very unevenly through social groups. I wouldn’t have come across fleek if it hadn’t been for the American Dialect Society mailing list.

This entry was posted on November 13, 2017 at 7:24 am and is filed under Linguistics in the comics, Slang. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.