The Out-of-Touch Adults’ Guide to Children’s Culture: What Is the Hozier Cry?
This week’s journey into the minds of people not yet old enough to rent a car is like a potpourri of unrelated trends and memes that paint a picture of the diverse ways young people relate to the world. Some TikTokers memorialize the peak moments of their lives with the “Hozier Scream,” while others spend their precious time on Earth making brain-melting “Jugtok” videos or getting really, really angry about chess and chubbyness. It’s a big world.
What is the Hozier cry?
“Hozier Scream” is used in TikTok videos to denote a peak, climax, impressive moment. Literary types could replace ” barbaric yapping.”
The end result is a video like this:
The reference and accompanying sound are to the song ” Northern Attitude “, a 2024 collaboration between Hozier and Noah Kahan, in which Hozier hits a particularly climactic note just as the song reaches its climax. Hozier, by the way, is an Irish singer-songwriter whose songs are heavily influenced by folk music. He is best known for his 2013 song ” Take Me to Church”.
So far, nearly 200,000 videos have used audio clips of Hozier and Kahan commenting on everything from encountering a bear to marriage proposals to graduating from cosmetology school .
What does “Yugg” mean? What is “Jugtok”?
The slang word “jagg” (sometimes “jug”) means to quickly grab or steal. Like most modern slang, it originated from AAVE, especially southern slang.
“Jugg” has been around for a while—the word is used in a number of rap songs from the 2010s—but more recently it has become widely used as part of a TikTok meme format called “juggtok,” a confusing brain-rot-oriented subculture in which certain slang words and acronyms are combined with a collection of unrelated images and video clips in a way that renders the whole thing meaningless. If I understand correctly, Jaggtok, its offshoots, and its adversaries such as Slimetok and Jollitok are deliberately ignoring explanations. They must be meaningless and self-referential. Here are a couple of examples:
( For more definitions, check out my slang glossary of “Aura Farming,” “Huzz,” and other Gen Z and Gen Alpha slang you might need help deciphering. )
Chubby filter sparks controversy on TikTok
The cultural debate over “fat acceptance” has been going on for a long time, but artificial intelligence is adding an interesting new twist. This month, a video filter called “Chubby AI” allowed Tiktokers to visualize what they would look like if they (gasp!) gained weight , and videos like this began going viral:
As you might expect, there was immediate backlash, as evidenced by X’s post from writer Bec Shaw:
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If you were hoping that young people would be more tolerant of overweight people because there are so many of them, you would be wrong. But on the bright side, I’m sure many skinny young people who look down on fat people will end up getting fatter themselves.
Is Chess.com trying to rename the bishop?
Since we’re in the business of controversy, last week Chess.com started some much dumber nonsense that argues that everyone has to pick a side in the culture wars, even chess-related websites.
The scandal began when Page X on Chess.com posted this seemingly harmless bait:
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Apparently some X users speculated that Chess.com wanted to rename the diagonally moving piece due to the religious connotations of the name “bishop”, so the comments section quickly filled with these responses from a “friendly neighbor Christian nationalist”:
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And this is from some other nonsense:
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And this from an ordinary person who had a completely ordinary day:
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In any case, Chess.com caused even more outrage with its troll posts:
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So is Chess.com really trying to destroy Christianity? Unfortunately no. They previously made a similar post about The Rook:
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And no one was afraid. The outcry over a pointless crap post shows that X is the worst website ever and no one should use it. I feel like I need a shower even after being in there for a few minutes.
Viral Videos of the Week: Can You Trick a Self-Driving Car?
As the great Criswell says in Plan 9 from Outer Space , the future is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives; no doubt most of this time will be spent driving, and driving will be very different in the future. Advanced technology quickly makes driver decisions, be it emergency braking or full automatic driving mode, so I can take a nap and drive to Hardys.
Driving with the help of a computer is usually a good idea, but the technology has its limits, and the future holds dangers involving cars that Henry Ford never dreamed of. For example, how would a self-driving car react to a brick wall painted to look like a road? That question is at the center of this week’s viral video, in which YouTube legend Mark Rober pits two leading self-driving car technologies against obstacles like thick fog, pouring rain and a wall painted to look like a road.
Robert’s experiments involve a car from Luminar with a self-driving system that uses LiDAR (light detection and ranging) for navigation, and a Tesla that uses cameras. Rober’s tests aren’t scientific (this is an entertainment YouTube channel, after all), but they are, as Elon Musk might write, “concerning.” Few drivers will ever encounter a brick wall painted to look like a road (unless they’re driving through a Warner Brothers movie), but the question of whether a car on autopilot will brake for an obstacle in thick fog seems to be a relevant one. And the results don’t look promising for Tesla.