That Shit Not Cray

Some slang terms stick around for a while, don't they? By all rights, using the word "cool" should be as outdated as calling somebody "Daddy-O," but for whatever reason "cool" stuck and "Daddy-O" ended up in the street dialect graveyard, becoming worm food with "far out" and "nuff respect" (a term that was used by mid-90s youth workers and absolutely nobody else). But some terms tend to go the distance, and the current one that doesn't seem to want to go away, is the ubiquitous "cray."

Crazy. Cray. Cray-cray. I don't know where it comes from, but I do know that it means the good kind of crazy (i.e. not the medically insane one) and that people started using it a lot more after it was in that track Kanye and Jay-Z put out last year that I forget the name of. It's now so omnipresent that, the other day, my mom was talking to her friend about furniture on the phone and I overheard her say that a Georgian chest of drawers she'd seen, "be cray, yo." We truly are living in the end of days.

It has one syllable and it rhymes with a lot of other words, so of course the Twitter jokers are all over it like a bad suit. And when one of the words it rhymes with is in the name of the book that will define 2012 in literary terms, all pun hell breaks loose:

And there are a zillion more where that came from, so as you can see, that joke's over now. That in mind, we decided to test how deep Twitter's cultural reference game really is. Let's start with an easy one:

Shit, half of Twitter is people whose sole reason for existing seems to be the distant possibility that One Direction will RT them. Maybe we need to target an older, more pun-savvy audience. Are Radiohead cray?

Really, Twitter? Not even on the same day they released a tune called "Daily Mail"? You cray slow.

Perhaps some Tory youth members are looking for a more street-friendly way to praise their commander-in-chief. Is he cray?

Nope, doesn't look like it. Maybe we need to go with someone who's more in tune with the zeitgeist:

FFS. Paul McCartney keeps turning up to places and playing "Hey Jude" this summer. Did anyone make the connection?

Less to do with The Beatles, more to do with incest. Not quite what we were looking for.

How about the coolest man in the world?

Someone more English?

The most English person alive?

OK, we're stumped. I guess the Twitter intelligentsia is too intelligent to engage in childish and puerile punning.

Oh wait, no, Dances With Welps is bringing the good vibes. See if you can come up with any more if you have nothing to do other than breathe this afternoon. Best one in the comments gets a Pulitzer.

Follow Clive on Twitter: @thugclive