S.L. Kletz

Today, I’m here to make a confession. While most people hate the word “moist” for no apparent reason, I think the word that has recently trended upwards in our growing vocabulary of youthful slang is one I hate more than anything:

Yap.

Yapping. Yapped. Yappy. Yapper. Yap sesh. Certified yapper. Yappadoodle. Yapa dapa ding dong. Sorry for yapping so much. Whatever. I fucking hate it.

My whole body rejects this word. Even when typing it out and I hear it uttered by the silent voice in my head, I recoil.

Maybe it’s the way the “p” closes the syllable in an unpleasant pluck. Perhaps its the way your jaw must unhinge to produce the “ya” sound. But what has been itching at the back of my mind is a feeling I can’t shake, nor do I have any proof that it is truthful. But the signals are there — flashing in red — something deep down telling me that yap is misogynistic.

I’ve been interested in studying the overlap between gender and language since 2022 when I conducted a year-long project on high-rising terminal (HRT) intonation, otherwise known as uptalk. Ever heard someone talk like this? Where every sentence is a question? Even though it might not be a question? Are you picturing a female talking? (Now that’s an actual question).

I’ve learned since how misogyny is deeply embedded in our language — from our daily vocabulary to how we perceive speech patterns. Women who speak using HRT intonations in an academic context are perceived to be less inclined towards academic success and HRT use is judged more harshly in “masculine” professions.

In examining the misogyny ingrained in our vocabulary, academic trailblazer of feminist linguistics (and my personal hero) Robin Lakoff wrote in 2003:

“English (like other languages) has many words describing women who are interested in power, presupposing the inappropriateness of that attitude. Shrew and bitch are among the more polite. There are no equivalents for men.”

There is a particular excess of insults in the English language specifically to describe a woman who speaks, such as — and this is only to name a few featured in The Handbook of Language and Gender: “scold, gossip, nag, termagant, virago, harpy, harridan, dragon, battleaxe, (castrating) bitch, magpie, jay, parrot, and poll.”

Notice how the common denominator between all of these insults is not just a woman talking, but sharing her opinion. If she asks for her needs to be met, she can be called a nag. If she is demanding and assertive, she can be judged a battleaxe. Even now, we have new terms in the form of names to stereotype women, often correlated to how they employ language: Karen emerged in the late 2010s to describe entitled white women, often accompanied with the phrase “I’d like to speak to the manager.” If we are going to do a valley accent, our name might be Jessicaaaa or Beck-ayyyy. Notice how we have Negative Nancys, Debbie Downers, and Chatty Cathys but no Talkative Tims, Killjoy Kyles, or Boring Borises. While I don’t think some white guy sat down 300 years ago to decide what terms would be used to describe women to keep them subservient, I do know that vocabulary emerges to meet our language needs. When we don’t have a word for something we want to say, we invent a word to fill the existing gap. In the case of describing women whom we don’t want to hear speak, we just so happen to have these words in excess.

Mary Talbot, an expert in critical discourse analysis, argues that the stereotyping of female speech is used by a patriarchy to maintain female powerlessness by subordinating women’s voices within public discourse. Sure, a lady can talk, but is she really saying anything? No. Silly woman, let the big boys do the real talking. And maybe when she starts to say something that challenges the status quo — maybe she starts to speak her mind — then we can just chuck a label on her loud mouth and call it a day.

So where does “yap” come into play here? If I told you to picture an animal that you would describe as “yappy” — are we in a general agreement that you are picturing some little dog with a shrill bark? It might be cute and think it’s capable of frightening off the delivery guy, but the reality is you can brush it off to the side with your foot or pick it up one-handed and lock it up in a crate. So, when “yap” becomes a term that seeps its way into internet discourse, particularly in the way young women are describing their speech, what is really happening here?

I hope I’m not the only one at this point discovering the canine correlation between “yap” and “bitch.” A yappy bitch may very well be your aunt’s shi tzu that never shuts the fuck up, but with those words’ present-day definitions, a yappy bitch could also be used to describe a woman who talks a lot. When examining the history of yap, its gendered nature becomes much more evident.

The term yap originated in the 1600s to imitate the sound of a shrill, yelping bark from a small dog. Yap then evolved over the next two-hundred years into the 1800s to refer to human speech — to talk in a way that is shrill and insistent. In exploring my hunch about the term’s misogyny, I had another hunch that the term shrill had something to do with it.

Ohio State Professor Tina Tallon, who specializes in technocultural history, wrote in a 2019 article on technology bias and women’s voices that, “women who speak publicly and challenge authority have long been dismissed as ‘shrill’ or ‘grating.’” Complaints about female voices having a shrill quality have been historically used to silence female voices, particularly with the growth of radio broadcasting into the early 20th century, where stations avoided giving women airtime due to complaints of the way their voices sounded “distorted” and “nasal” over the radio.

The derision and silencing of women’s voices due to the way their voices sound is not exclusive to radio, but extends into literature and the political sphere as well.

In Washington Irving’s 1819 short story “Rip Van Winkle“, the narrator describes the voice of the titular character’s wife Dame Van Winkle as shrill and sharp. He goes on to describe her with some of the aforementioned insults for talking women — termagant, virago, and shrew — all for possessing the audacity to ask her husband to feed their starving children. In a modern retelling of this story, the line “she yapped his ear off” could easily fit among its pages (it is important to note for all of the story’s focus on the unbearable quality of her voice and the suffering it puts her husband through, Dame Van Winkle does not utter a single syllable of dialogue. Funny how that works).

During the 2024 election cycle, the discourse about the quality of a woman’s voice morphed into complaints about — of all things — presidential candidate Kamala Harris’ laugh. Ohio Sheriff Bruce Zuchowski called Harris a “laughing hyena” and her opponent Donald Trump referred to her on Truth Social as “Laffin’ Kamala” and “Cackling Copilot Kamala Harris” (I really can’t make this shit up, unfortunately).

It remains interesting, then, that a term rooted in four centuries of negative baggage has been adopted into Gen-Z’s metaphorical dictionary of its favorite slang words, even making it into the very real Collins English Dictionary’s shortlist for 2024’s word of the year (among looksmaxxing, brainrot, and delulu).

Entertainment company The Daily Dot describes “yapping” in a 2024 TikTok video as a Gen-Z term for “talking someone’s ear off.” The same video gestures that lecturing teachers and “parents who won’t shut up” could be considered yappers, and includes a clip from TikTok user @james_beardwell captioned “When bro is the ultimate yapper” where one man sizes up a piece of duct tape for his counterpart’s mouth.

In simpler terms, yap captures a kind of speech that is not necessarily important to the listener, but is used in excess by the speaker, potentially to a point of annoyance on the part of the listener. In this instance, the yapping is one-sided. In an instance where yapping includes everyone involved in the conversation (being two or more), I would say listener annoyance is withheld since all parties assume the role of speaker and listener and are actively participating in the conversation.

When it comes to multiple parties yapping, the term assumes a more positive connotation between participants. My friends gush over dates who are “good to yap with” or describe long conversations as “yapping.” But the term still feels hollow. A kind of talking to fill the air.

In nailing down its definition here, I think people can certainly agree on what types of discussions are not yapping. Corporate executives don’t yap in boardrooms. UN ambassadors aren’t yapping about policy their legislative sessions. Doctors don’t yap to their patients about treatment options for cancer. Yap requires the presence of casualness, yet this is where the danger of the term begins.

A staff editorial written for The Phillipian notes that referring to another’s speech as yapping “has the potential to dismiss meaningful contributions or shut down ideas before they become fully developed.” When we label our speech as yapping, we are making a value statement about the worth imbued in discussion. While we may not be doing this devaluing consciously, the language we use to describe the way we talk can begin to reflect not only the way we view our voices, but also the lens through which society looks at them (although, I would pause here to say the language-society relationship is a cycle — “yap” didn’t just appear out of nowhere. It is a product of a society trending towards fascism and the pillars of patriarchy it relies upon to stand — assuming I’m doing well enough in convincing you of the term’s misogyny).

I liken “yap” to another trending phrase “I’m just a girl” — statements that young women make, often after making a mistake or encountering difficulty with personal responsibilities. Hit a curb? I’m just a girl! Lost the key to your apartment? I’m just a girl! Don’t know how insurance works? I’m just a girl!

While acting as a source of humor and relatability (I mean, same. I am a young female who doesn’t really know how insurance works), the phrase’s resident limiting modifier just becomes self-minimizing when paired with the noun phrase a girl. Past its humor and call back to a Gwen Stefani classic, the innocence of the phrase is precisely the source of its harms — how the casual demeaning of the capabilities of women is met in our modern lingo with open arms.

As I said, new words and phrases emerge to meet the present deficits of a language’s descriptive capacity (think how ‘to Google‘ is an now official verb referring to the action of making a query on an internet search engine). If we, as a patriarchal society, are looking for a way to pass off human mistakes and struggles as silly and socially acceptable, we can chalk it up to I’m just a girl. If we’re looking for a way to describe conversations where we may talk a lot about nothing important, we can say we were yapping. Rather than recognizing discussion beyond just an intellectual capacity — to include it as a tool for building community and intimacy, especially among female relationships — we can just chalk it up to little dogs barking. Bitches talking. Women conversing. Nothing important happening here.

Female-centered entertainment brand Betches‘ writer Marissa Dow describes the “this and yap” trend in a 2025 article, defining the phrase as “a situation or experience [that] is perfect for sitting down to enjoy with your friends.” The trend entails social media users, commonly young women, posting footage of places like restaurants, hiking trails, and the front seats of cars as the perfect places to yap. Dow writes, “For example, if a restaurant posted a shot of their happy hour special… I would 1000% comment ‘this and yap’ along with tagging my bestie.”

Prior to a conversation even occurring, people are preemptively describing the discussion as yapping, and creating a mental picture of who is involved in this theoretical conversation that is meant to qualify for the markers of “yapping.” While I understand people aren’t doing so maliciously, often using yap as a synonym for talk, context doesn’t erase the denotative and connotative power of a word. While our intention may not be to devalue speech, the term is doing that work for you.

I find it then, especially dangerous when “yap” proliferates the physical and digital spheres of people and young women describing their speech and having their speech described. Our voice is our power, and I firmly believe the term “yap”, even when used in a positive context like talking with your best friend, subtly undermines our power, linking our dialogue to thoughts of annoying sounds and imagery of teeny tiny dogs, even if this is occurring on an unconscious level.

I do firmly believe there is a chance you’ve read along with this whole thing thinking, “Girl, it is not that serious,” and to that I counter that change is not possible without small, subtle shifts. Patriarchy trends upwards with fascism, and we are currently watching the misogyny of incel culture seep its way into social media algorithms of young men by marketing itself as protein shakes and alpha male lifestyles. And, as I must reiterate — language is fed by culture, and vice versa. When young boys are using terms like “foids” to refer to women (“female” + “humanoid” — would you describe a robot’s tone as potentially being… shrill?), it is ever important to resist the normalization of terms that contribute to the degradation of women’s humanity, no matter how subtle. Patriarchy thrives on women’s participation in their own dehumanization — whether that operates on the level of cultish Instagram tradwifery or women, innocently so, substituting the term yapping for talking.

So, if I may ask you this one final question — after all of the talking I have done at you — you, with no way to respond other than to comment or message me your thoughts — would you still say that all I have done here in this article has been nothing more than yapping at you? I wonder.