yeet

You might have noticed that people yeet things now. It's a specific type of throwing. Here's a helpful hint I saw on twitter this week:

'Yoink' is the opposite of 'yeet'

Until as recently as January, I thought there was a regional difference in this word. The American Dialect Society had it as one of their Words of 2018, but with the meaning 'indication of surprise or excitement' - an exclamation. It was said to be onomatopoeic, the sound of yeeting something into a bin or whatever and 'pronounced with a celebratory gesture'. 

Urban dictionary seems to have only the exclamation in the older entries (though still accompanying the yeeting action of course). And as with so many new words, it may well come from black American pop culture, originating or possibly just finding new life in a dance. 

It may well have been onomatopoeic over here as well, but it was very definitely a verb of throwing, not an exclamation. What's more, because of its similarity to our Germanic-origin irregular verbs, it's got a past tense of yote and takes part in wordplay like yeeteth in the tweet above (see also twote for the past tense of tweet). 

I don't know if the two senses have always been available to everyone and it was just different bits of them got out into the mainstream, or if they've converged more recently. And I am FULLY aware of how painfully white and middle-aged and out of touch I sound just writing this post. 

Who run(s) the world?

Which of the following is correct? 

(1) Who runs the world? Girls!
(2) Who run the world? Girls! 

If your judgements match mine, you picked (1). But if you think about it, that's really weird. And it seems like at least some people find both of them OK. The two options are illustrated in these images that I collected within a day or so of each other without even looking for them: 

Who run the world? Girls

Who runs the world? [Image of a woman with a toddler, both raising their hands]

If they were statements, not questions, there wouldn't be a choice. (4) is ungrammatical in standard English and most of its varieties:

(3) Girls run the world
(4) *Girls runs the world

The reason (4) is ungrammatical (that's what the asterisk means) is because it has a plural subject (girls) and singular agreement on the verb (runs, rather than run).

To go back to our original examples, who doesn't have any information about whether it refers to a singular or a plural subject. It could be either, and (5), with a singular referent for who, is just as good as (1), where the referent is the plural girls.

(5) Who runs the world? Mark Zuckerberg. 

So that explains why it can cause either singular or plural agreement to appear on the verb.

And although I find it more natural with singular agreement, you can easily nudge it towards the plural agreement if there's a clear expectation that the answer is plural, such as if you know that the answer is either boys or girls, and you've forgotten which.

(6) Remind me, who did you say run the world? 

And that just leaves us with one mop-up, which is to say that the default if you don't have any information about number is to use the singular. That fits with the general principle that singular is the unmarked form: languages usually have some way of marking things as plural, not singular, just like English using -s for plurals and nothing for singular nouns (girl vs girls).