Explain Like I'm 35: What is Yapping? (February 4, 2024)

Ally Perry • Writer and Editor

Feb 4, 2024 4:00 PM EST

The entirety of social media relies on the fact that some people are physically incapable of shutting up. It's an ecosystem sustained by diarrhea of the keyboard and/or phone camera. While many have criticized this state of affairs, it's not until recently that we have had the meme-ready vocabulary to describe it: the online third space is full to the brim with yappers.

Yapping is not as oblique as some fashionable internet slang can be. In fact, it's faithful to the Oxford English Dictionary's definition of "to talk in a silly, noisy and usually annoying way". It's also the noise that small dogs make (there is no doubt that it is what the cloyingly cute Mulch Gang were doing on TikTok a couple of months ago). However, the memeified usage of the term first appeared earlier than this, with TikTokers using it to tease vocal animals and people from at least late 2022 onwards.

The verb sees liberal usage in the context of content creators in particular, for example questioning the storytelling tactics the notorious controversy-baiting YouTuber Kevin Leonardo. Aside from that, though, the word often pops up as a kind of online code for a real-life instance of somebody who doesn't know the meaning of silence and is either oblivious, or owns the fact proudly. It's a yapper's world, and we're just living in it.