👉 Okay, settle into your gloom helmets, folks! Let’s tackle this…
peculiar
little piece of late-era 90s/early 2000s vernacular: the undeniably baffling, frankly quite aggressively beige, utterance –
shanice.
Now, you're probably sitting here squinting at that word as if it personally offended your eyeballs. And honestly? You wouldn’t be entirely wrong to feel a little bewildered by it. Let me unpack this, because I genuinely spent a solid 20 minutes on the internet researching why this thing existed and I still came up largely short. Basically, "shanice" was a gender neutral placeholder name. Before we had the absolute deluge of nicknames like, you know… dude , or, let's face it, even just using someone’s freaking first name felt weird in casual conversation, there was this… gap. Shan—who knew? It was essentially whatever-you-want to call that acquaintance who is neither male nor female and exists somewhere between a beige wall and a lukewarm cup of tea. The prevailing theory, which I find deeply unsettling because it implies we needed a whole freaking concept around not knowing someone's name, goes something like: the word was birthed in an AOL chat room sometime around 1998, as part of an ironic and somewhat aggressively bland attempt at being all inclusive and wacky. There are documented instances of people genuinely using
