919: Tween Bromance

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Tween Bromance

Title text: Verbiage. Va-jay-jay. Irregardless.

Explanation

Apparently, Randall hates some ridiculous neologisms. Cueball seems to be dictating a "Tween bromance" story or novel to Megan, who is possibly typing it up. He is including all the words that get to Megan in a sequence. Megan is just annoyed and starts to shriek in rage and annoyance; considering Cueball keeps speaking more annoying words in the title text, that seems to have been the point.

• "Tween" means a pre-adolescent. Portmanteau of teen and between, specifically above the age of 9 (the last value not in the tens) and below the age of 13 (the first actual "-teen" number).
• "Bromance" means a close non-sexual friendship between two males. Portmanteau of brother and romance.
• "Guesstimate" means an estimate made with very little information. Portmanteau of guess and estimate.
• "Frenemy" means a friend who is also a rival. Portmanteau of friend and enemy.
• "Yiff" is a word invented by the furry community. In most contexts it simply means "copulate", supposedly derived from the sound a fox makes during mating, and can refer to any form of sexual activity, including cybersex.
• "moist" is an ordinary word, but one that many people find mildly creepy, especially in this context.
• "Taint" is the part between the genitals and the anus (the perineum) in slang.
• "Panties" is a common term in the U.S. for women's underwear.
• "Preggers" a slang term for being pregnant.
• "verbiage" is a fairly new usage of an older word, meaning too many words used to explain a subject.
• "Va-jay-jay" /vəˈjājā/ IPA /vəˈdʒeɪdʒeɪ/ is a way of saying "vagina".
• "Irregardless" is a solecism. Or perhaps this portmanteau.

So, the full sentence roughly translates to: By my rough guess, my friend-slash-rival engaged in sexual activity so intensely that her wet perineum caused her underwear to become pregnant.

This is probably nonsensical, as clothing cannot bear children.^{[citation needed]} It may also reflect Cueball’s intentional parody of writers who lack understanding of anatomy/basic reasoning. However, at a stretch, the word “preggers” could be interpreted to refer to the rare, literal meaning of pregnant: full/filled. By this logic, “her moist taint made her panties preggers” would simply be an unusual way to say “her underwear were filled up with liquid”. But in that case: ew.

Like this comic fills a sentence with (gross) neologisms, 550: Density crams a sentence with memes.

According to 1485: Friendship, Randall doesn't like the word bromance much either. Uncomfortable synonyms are also seen in 1322: Winter and 2352: Synonym Date.

Transcript

[All of Cueball's lines are overlaid over the entire comic; the panels listed are merely the ones directly under each sentence fragment.]

[Cueball is standing smugly behind Megan, who is seated in front of a computer and typing.]

Cueball: By my guesstimate,

Cueball: my frenemy yiffed so hard

Cueball: her moist taint made

[Megan's eye twitches.]

Cueball: her panties preggers!

Megan: STOP IT STOP IT!

Trivia

• In the first frame, the back of Megan's chair is missing.

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Discussion

Language elitist. Davidy²²[talk] 09:26, 9 March 2013 (UTC)

I think this needs an incomplete flag: the explanation needs more contextual detail, about colloquial portmanteaus like 'frenemy' and the common disapproval of 'words' like 'irregardless'. --Mynotoar (talk) 08:59, 9 February 2014 (UTC)

GAH! He's not DICTATING, the title is another joke! Tween? Bromance? Come on fellas and ladies. They are the first two portmanteaus! Cueball is essentially spitting out a sentence with an endless stream of irritating, inane, infintilisms, in an incredibly insensitive, lol, effort to drive Megan to the brink of insanity! Couldn't resist that last one. Yiffed made me giggle, the rest, connected to it, made my abs hurt from laughing, especially after Megan's reaction. He deserves a medal. Oh goodness. No profile so please don't use my IP address to violate me via the Internetz, if that is possible to do with an IP address. I would not know. Grazie. 173.245.55.84 09:32, 22 February 2014 (UTC)

I'm not anybody here, I was just passing by and enjoying the annotations on these xkcd comics, but it seems to me like no explanation of this comic would be complete without talking about word aversion, sometimes called "the moist panties phenomenon", if someone wants to be funny. Basically, he is listing words that make people (or Randall himself?) uncomfortable. This page --- http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004835.html -- talks about word aversion in relation to the more common "word rage" that some neologisms and words that began as errors provoke. 108.162.237.192 08:52, 22 August 2014 (UTC)

The back of the chair is missing in the first frame. Probably just a mistake but didn't see it mentioned. 108.162.216.33 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

Just a question: tween really is PRE-adolescent?? I always thought it was the equivalent of ten -> teen for twenty, so someone out of their teens, but in their (presumably early) twenties. I definitely have seen it used as such on different occasions, but it might have been by non-native speakers, as I am not living in an english-speaking country. Also, in my opinion, the rest of the comic has more of a twenty-somethings-who-never-came-out-of-puberty ring to it than a child's. 162.158.85.69 19:41, 30 August 2016 (UTC)

2 minutes ago I thought the same. I definitely saw that usage as an anglicism in German somewhere. However a quick google search proved, that the definition given here (children aged ~9-12) seems to be the actual one. --Lupo (talk) 08:56, 8 January 2020 (UTC)

I think there are two parallel usages in play. I'm not a native speaker, but "tweens" is used by Tolkien in the Lord of the rings for the twenties in hobbits, who are only considered adult in their early thirties. Any usage derived from this probably refers to the early twenties. The books (and later the films) are a staple of popular culture around the world, so that slipping into a current vocabulary would not surprise me. Wether it was redefined to mean another age group by someone not familiar with the story or reinvented via a different etymology is a mystery to me. Definitely confused me the first time I read it somewhere with the other meaning. 162.158.154.139 10:45, 27 March 2020 (UTC)

By my understanding, a "tween" is someone aged (roughly) 10-12, i.e. somewhere "between" early childhood and teenager-hood. 108.162.215.118 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

Oh, so one should stop searching for "tween porn"? 198.41.242.119 13:42, 22 December 2021 (UTC)

It seems the link to the "portmanteau" changed. Perhaps an archive copy can be found? 172.70.147.131 18:18, 8 August 2022 (UTC)

Why is this in furries category!? Moderator (talk) 23:11, 5 February 2024 (UTC)

Nevermind Moderator (talk) 23:11, 5 February 2024 (UTC)

updated for the new generation: "By my sigma grindset, my oomfie rizzed so hard her moist gyatt made her skibidi in Ohio!" Arthur101 (talk) 15:48, 3 March 2024 (UTC)

STOP IT STOP IT! 172.70.90.82 13:25, 27 September 2024 (UTC)