What's Up With Hot?

What's up with kids these days?

In this article, I will analyze Gen Z slang. I expect my article to give off the same vibes as this video.

(For a ~5,000-word defense of the meme linked above, see here).

Among my generation, the word “hot” is all the rage. There’s both a song and cultural phenomenon called Hot Girl Summer. Now, when I am confused about my generation, I turn to Vox dot com, and here, as always, they did not let me down. They quote Megan Thee Stallion (not her birth name) (also not a stallion) describing it as:

“Girl, it’s hoe szn. Period. What makes a hot girl summer? Your attitude and your vibe. It’s 2019 — a year for women to do what they want to do.”

Something is hot girl summer at some time T if and only if….

“It’s just basically about women — and men — just being unapologetically them, just having a good-ass time, hyping up your friends, doing you, not giving a damn about what nobody got to say about it. You definitely have to be a person that can be the life of the party, and, y’know, just a bad bitch.”

Hmm, really sounds like my kind of thing (well, minus the bad bitch bit, I assume, though perhaps there will be a revisionary definition of that too). I am a woman or a man (man, to be exact), and my articles about anthropics meet all these criteria—unapologetically me (I don’t apologize to those who adopt the self-sampling assumption), they cause me to have a “good-ass time,” and I’ve even been known to hype up my friends (for instance, my friend Amos is much better at philosophy than you’d think from reading his blog). And yet somehow, I feel that despite the definition provided by Megan Thee Stallion including this, it’s not quite what she had in mind!

Reddit also helpfully clarifies that there are such things as hot girl walks defined as:

You go on a walk to get out of the house and get some light exercise. You can bring your favorite drink or listen to music. You do it to feel good about yourself and get in a good headspace. Hot girls take walks to feel nice. Hot girl walk.

Look, I’m no expert, but this just sounds like a walk! And presumably, they wouldn’t say that only attractive people should go on such walks!

Nearby in internet land, on substack, there’s a page known as

Hot Literati

, that described itself as for “hot, cool, well-read people.” This is, I think, indicative of the word hot taking on a very different meaning from the typical one—I do not think these people would think that ugly people should not read their blog.

So, what’s going on? What prompted this linguistic shift?