3 ms·

And in a completely unrelated derivation, the word "mid" means "not very good" in Gen Z slang.

• permo-w 3y ago
  it means average. as in mid-tier
  • gbear605 3y ago
    It literally means average, but in actual usage it means bad. For example, if an outfit is described as “mid”, the implication is that the outfit is bad and the person should not be wearing it. Maybe this is because more than half of everything is bad?
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    • permo-w 3y ago
      this isn't how I've heard it used
    • TeMPOraL 3y ago
      It's not that more than half of everything is bad (technically this can't be, if by "bad" we mean "worse than average"); it's more of a social interplay issue. The specific example you gave: > if an outfit is described as “mid”, the implication is that the outfit is bad and the person should not be wearing it. I'd say most people on the Internet have been conditioned since childhood to deliver and expect "white lies" on such topics. The actual mid-tier/average outfit is indicated by nonspecific reactions such as "you look great!". Saying "this looks average" is pretty much an insult. Greatness, or extreme badness, are communicated by expending extra effort on description, delivery or acts surrounding it. Similar phenomenon applies to pretty much anything involving descriptions of individuals or their choices. In the extreme, you get the supposed[0] German way of doing employee references, where a reference is never in any way negative, but if it looks ordinary, like "Person X is never late", it is to be mentally prefixed with "Literally the only good thing we can say about them is that...". This kind of heavily biased distribution of scales seems to be a wider thing in general. Obvious examples are all kinds of star ratings on-line: in e-commerce, in app stores, delivery services, restaurants, etc.: 5 stars out of 5 is "good", 4 stars is "meh", anything below is strictly negative. From my own life, I remember one pre-internet case: school grades. On a scale of 1-5, with 6 being awarded for extraordinary achievements, the actual scale - as perceived by teachers, parents and students - was: 1-3 = various shades of bad; 4 = meh/average; 5 = what parents expect you should be getting by default; 6 = what parents expect you to get if you show minimum effort. -- [0] - Something I've read about multiple times on HN.
  • bgribble 3y ago
    My gen Z kids use it to mean something significantly worse than "average". If something is "mid", it's really pretty gross or unappealing.
  • 98codes 3y ago
    More like mediocre; average, perhaps, but unacceptably so.
  • tetraca 3y ago
    Nobody wants anything average.
• canjobear 3y ago
  Not totally unrelated: they both come from Proto-Indo-European root *me meaning middle, via different routes.