Senior government and politics major
The good thing about YOLO — and there aren’t a lot of good things about YOLO — is that as a slang word, it’s fairly easy to explain. It stands for “you only live once,” and it’s an interjection popularized by Drake for when people want to live without regrets or do something risky. It’s not clever, but it’s fairly straightforward.
The other day, however, I heard the word “Plurntsday.”
Plurntsday is derived from plurnt, which is derived from turnt. It’s not wildly popular yet, but it has potential. Plurntsday refers to the day Chicago-based DJ collaboration Flosstradamus is performing in your city when you are feeling plurnt. Plurnt is a sense of peace, love, unity and respect, while being turnt. Turnt is the sense of being drunk. In short, Plurntsday is being drunk and feeling good at a Flosstradamus concert.
We don’t need words for this. It’s a transparent marketing strategy, and I want to believe it’s harder than this to train young people to casually spit out advertisements. We need Plurntsday as badly as we need “buffalowrappression” — the feeling when the lady at the sandwich station rolls your buffalo chicken wrap before folding the ends in. The only difference is that buffalo chicken wraps don’t need to advertise.
I can deal with turnt. Turnt is one of many in the revolving door of euphemisms for drinking and drug use. With each new synonym for “high” or “drunk,” a new generation asserts they were cooler than the last at parties.
YOLO, which Drake eventually apologized for on Saturday Night Live, was, like plurnt, mostly rooted in advertising. But YOLO is saved by its utility, because shouting “parkour” when doing something barely acrobatic had gotten stale since the decline of The Office, and YOLO was more widely applicable to acts of spontaneity. For a little while, it was funny to excuse wearing shorts in the cold, leaving your phone in your dorm or throwing out your malformed buffalo wrap before paying for it because you only live once.
Plurnt has no such value. Its utility does not redeem its commercial roots because the use of plurnt is limited to those banal Monday elevator conversations about the weekend. If left unchecked, it will grow in popularity, Flosstradamus will reap extra attention from it and some fraction of students will feel bad in a few years for using “Plurntsday” unironically.
End the cycle. Just because you only live once doesn’t mean you should feel plurnt while you’re turnt on Plurntsday.
Emma Atlas is a junior government and politics and journalism major. She can be reached at eatlasdbk@gmail.com.
