#aintnobodygottimeforthat: cultural appropriation, stylization and the social life of hashtag interjectionality

This paper will discuss a hashtag meme as a potential new manifestation of interjectionality, engendered and fostered in the written online context of social media. The case derives from a video meme and hashtag from the United States which ‘went viral’ in 2012. We will ask to what extent such hashtags might perform interjectional-type functions, thereby having links to other, more prototypically interjectional elements. The case will also be discussed from multiple perspectives: as an example of the (indirect) signifying of ‘whiteness’ through ‘black’ discourse, as cultural appropriation in the context of potential policing of these racial divides in the United States, and as a case of performative stylization which highlights grammatical markers while simultaneously downplaying phonological markers of African American English. We will end by speculating as to the implications of the rise of (variant forms of) hashtags for processes of creative language use in the future.