The 'awesome turtle'.

Did you ever wander how new slang gets started, or just new things that people say. Like how did something like ‘gay’; a word that means happy turn into another way of saying homosexual? How did something like ‘hot’; a word that is referring to a certain level of heat, turn into another way of saying sexy, or attractive? I sometimes wonder about things like this, but I only think about these things when I am really, really bored, or when I am lying in bed and instead of falling asleep my head just starts to think random thoughts. Right now I am very bored, but I am also thinking about how things like ‘awkward turtle’ began. According to Wikipedia, the awkward turtle originated from the sign language gesture for turtle or sea, but then Wikipedia goes against itself by saying that some American sign language expert said that the awkward turtle gesture is the same as the sign language gesture for platypus, and that deaf students in the institute have never heard of the ‘awkward turtle’.

It seems that for the first time in my life, Wikipedia doesn’t know something. So instead of looking at another site, I have given up instantly and I have decided that the origin for the awkward turtle is a mystery that will never, ever be solved. It was sometime last week that in a response to something awesome, I said ‘awesome turtle’. I remember the person that I said it to was left confused and wandering why I said awesome turtle. I then did an extremely small amount of researching before I came to the conclusion that awesome turtle is something that has never, ever been said ever before and that I invented it and that it was a new slang term that I was going to assist in taking off and being just as big as the awkward turtle. The first thing I did was change my Facebook status accordingly, it read; ‘Awesome Turtle – Like the Awkward Turtle, only less awkward and more awesome.’ It was a very unsuccessful start to the awesome turtle. Three people liked it, Elliot Womersley went ahead to comment the following, ‘it’s a ninja turtle isn’t it?’ and then Jesse Farrand-Harbutt changed the topic to basketball in the span of a single comment, and then Elliot and Jesse talked about Basketball on my status for a further six comments.

The awesome turtle was a disaster right from the beginning, only three people liked it and their reasons for liking it, I still don’t know. They might have liked it by accident, they might have thought it said something else or maybe, they actually do like the term, ‘awesome turtle’. I was sitting with Dajana at indoor the other day, watching the other teams play after our game, and we were talking about whatever it is that we were talking about, she said something awesome, and then I said ‘awesome turtle’. The conversation went silent for a few seconds before she said, ‘no’ and then we talked about what a failure it was. The awesome turtle is not going to happen, it has been a failure and now even I must stop saying it. I don’t know how people start new slang terms, get them off their feet and start a revolution, but it must be too hard of a job for just one man.