Words of 2014: Against bae
I detest “bae.”
Bae is not bae. The moment I discovered (first on Urban Dictionary, but it checks out) that “bae” is, in fact, Danish for “poop,” I felt as if a light had been kindled somewhere deep within me.
I realize that standing athwart history yelling “Stop using this word!” is pointless. (Words don’t work like that. Especially not terms of endearment. I am still trying to convince certain people to stop calling me “Lexie.”) But someone has to, every so often, just so we know where we stand.
Four things bother me about “bae.” One, that if you just looked at it and compared it to other words in the English language, you would think it was pronounced “bee” or “bye.” You would not think it was pronounced “bay.” Not immediately, anyway. You would have to winnow down the language of origin. Often, when “a” and “e” are hanging out in such cozy proximity, it is in words with Latin origins — “caesar,” say, or “aeon” or “algae” — where it comes out sounding like “ee.” I know this isn’t always the case — there’s Gaelic origins to contend with — “Gaelic” sounds like a long “A” — and French things like “Aeropostale,” or some plurals, like “Bacchae,” where people go for a hard “I” sound. There is a world of variance here. My general response when I see “a” and “e” hanging out together is to cross to the opposite side of the sentence and hope I will not need to pronounce anything at all.
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When I look at the word “bae” as spelled, I have no idea how to pronounce it. And neither should anyone, until we know its language of origin. This turns out to be just taking the “b” out of “babe” so it wouldn’t get between us and our, er, baes. (How do you pluralize, it, bae the bae? Baes looks incredibly wrong.)
My second and more serious objection is that there’s nothing more frustrating than so-called abbreviations that don’t actually abbreviate. Why anyone on this blue-green earth would want to “shorten” John to Jack, say, has always been beyond me. Either you are making the word shorter, or you are not. Katharine to Katie makes sense. William to Will makes sense. Steven to Stevie does not. The same with “babe” and “bae.” Was that second “b” really so hard? Was that really taking so much time away from us? Could we really not bear that second plosive?
My third objection is a perennial objection to the introduction of hip new words and fashions — eventually people will hear about them, and then people who should absolutely under no circumstances adopt them, whatever they are, from skinny jeans to saying “turnt,” will do so, and you will have to see Grandma trying “normcore” and hear “bae” from Applebee’s on Twitter. And “bae” in such contexts sounds especially egregious. (“Pancakes, bae?”)
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Fourth, there is already a man named Kenneth Bae, and I can’t help feeling all this must be very confusing for him.
But hold it, you say. One of the time-honored rituals of courtship is coming up with some asinine term of endearment for the other party. Snookums. Sugar-Bear. Red Panda. Lord Liberace of the Five Armies. (Gee, I’m not very good at this.) Maybe, in that sense, “bae” is the word we deserve: one universal mortifying term for addressing the beloved — at least until the next, sillier one comes along. Before “bae,” there was “boo.” After it — “bee”? “Bye”? Maybe we’ll get through all those pronunciations after all.
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