this post was submitted on 04 Jan 2024
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[–] [email protected] 9 points 10 months ago (8 children)
[–] [email protected] 31 points 10 months ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 11 points 10 months ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago

“I’m being totally hatless, bro, I swear.”

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

The real revolutionaries

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

This is the way.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Millennial here. I’ve heard from the younger folks that it means something like “no lie”, or “I swear this is true”.

Being out of touch, I’m not sure if this is synonymous with “deadass”.

grandpa-Simpson-i-used-to-be-with-it.png

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Oh, I assumed it meant like no upper bound. "She's the best basketball player, no cap."

I haven't tried to use it, but I guess I was close enough to understand what they were saying.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

Pretty sure it directly replaces "for real"

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

I'd like to know the backstory for why "cap" became the slang, not so eager to find out why the asses are dead

[–] [email protected] 10 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (4 children)

I'm going to offer my own theory here, which doesn't seem to be in line with the most popular theories which seem to me to be creative guesses at the origin.

I think it's possibly from twitch.tv culture. "Kappa" was a popular emote with a smug face often used to denote sarcasm. Plenty of streamers have used the phrase "No kappa" to indicate they're not joking, and some shortened it to "no kap". Since it was passed on orally, it became mistranscribed to "no cap." People were looking for an explanation for a phrase that didn't exist, and inadvertently invented one, which became the predominant theory that you'll find if you search for "no cap origin."

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

I've heard it in lyrics from long before twitch existed

In Black slang, to cap about something is “to brag,” “to exaggerate,” or “to lie” about it. This meaning of cap dates back to the early 1900s.

https://www.dictionary.com/e/slang/no-cap/

Green's Dictionary of Slang - Cap

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

This was my theory too when I first heard it said. It wasn’t till later when I saw it spelled that I realized it’s “no cap” and not “no kap”.

I still got perfect understanding of the meaning from thinking about it in terms of the Kappa emote.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

No, I'm pretty sure it came from hip hop culture, like a lot of slang recently. I'm basing this purely my anecdotal observation of the kind of people who use it most frequently.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

I'm going to go with this theory, because I at least know what Kappa is

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

think: "no joke", "s'truth", "for real", "no lie"

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Replace "cap" with "shit" and it means the same thing.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

It's the true-true.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago

https://www.dictionary.com/e/slang/no-cap/

Has history in Atlanta black slang from the 1940s. However, "cap" isn't short for anything I can find. (I was hoping "capitulate").