If you suddenly feel like you’re noticing the term “rawdogging” used widely and in surprising contexts — online, in the office, at the bar — you’re not alone.
Over the last few months, the slang term, which has historically been used to refer to sexual intercourse without a condom, has been adopted to describe almost any activity accomplished without the assistance of a buffer. Now, you can rawdog the flu by refusing medication; you can rawdog cooking by not using a recipe; you can even rawdog life, by being sober.
The most obvious example of the term’s spread is the phenomenon of “rawdogging” flights. The trend, which was written about last month by GQ, has been cropping up across social media platforms like TikTok and X, with people — mostly men — enduring long flights without indulging in any entertainment other than staring at the in-flight map. The concept, which was the subject of a viral tweet in 2022, has come as a shock to some commenters who couldn’t imagine why someone would put themselves through something so boring.
“Just rawdogged it, 15 hr flight to Melbourne. No movie, no music, just flightmap (I counted to one million twice),” Torren Foot, an Australian music producer, wrote in the caption of a video posted on TikTok last month. It has since received more than 11 million views.
Even celebrities are in on the act. In an Instagram story posted this month, the actor Ryan Phillippe, best known for films like “Cruel Intentions” and “Crash,” posted a selfie from an outdoor concert venue. “Raw doggin’ this concert: solo, no alcohol, no drugs, no concessions,” read the caption.
But according to Adam Aleksic, a linguist and content creator who is writing a book about how social media has changed language, Gen Z was using the term long before the flight videos started spreading rapidly on TikTok. Mr. Aleksic said he first noticed the usage of the word beginning to shift around 2019 or 2020.
“It’s always been funny to use sex words in non sex situations, and we have been doing that forever,” Mr. Aleksic said in a recent interview. He pointed to other terms with sexual origins — such as “sucks,” or “screwed the pooch” — that have evolved into parts of everyday speech.
“It’s not a new thing that it’s like Gen Z making weird sex jokes,” he said. “Everybody’s always found sex jokes funny. That’s just a recurring, time-honored process.”
Mr. Aleksic explained that the term has become a dysphemism: instead of making a concept lighter or less offensive, as one might do with a euphemism, “we make it more intense for a joking purpose,” he said.
In a TikTok post that received more than three million views, Mr. Aleksic explained that dysphemisms typically go through three phases: “There’s the novel phase, where we create a metaphor largely for shock value,” he said. “Then we have the semi-lexicalized phase, which is still understood as inappropriate but contextualized within a larger conceptual framework. Finally, the dysphemism becomes completely lexicalized and we forget it was ever inappropriate.”
At its current rate, Mr. Aleksic predicts “rawdogging” could hit that final phase within the next 100 years, though some of the commenters on his video think it might be sooner.
“I put it in a presentation on Monday,” a user identified as Tom Dux said.
The post A Wildly Obscene Term’s Path to Mainstream Usage appeared first on New York Times.
