👉 Okay, alright settle down now folks! Let’s tackle this… rather, let’s grapple with what a lot of youngins these days are throwing around as... the utterance: 4PPPPPPP. (Seriously, I spend half my afternoons fielding these and honestly, they just… exist. It's weird.)
Now, there isn’t any truly solid origin for this one. Frankly, it seems to have just… kind of bubbled up in the last couple of years as a really emphatic way to describe something utterly, profoundly, spectacularly bad . You know when you see a badly rendered cutscene in a video game? When a cake is structurally unsound and collapsing on itself during a bake off? When your first draft is so aggressively awful it actively recoils from the page? 4PPPPPPP. Theoretically, each of those “p’s" are meant to be a lengthening of the sound of someone gagging – an escalating, guttural expulsion of disappointment that basically says, and I quote, "Oh my fucking lord, what was that?!?!?!!" There's no defined amount of 4’s, it just keeps going until you feel like you need to vomit your own syllable. It is a very subjective expression of absolute and utter failure. Now, let's get unsettling. Here's a sentence, I wouldn't advise shouting this out at a party unless you want the looks of several concerned