“Go Girl! Give Us Nothing!”
Scrolling online in the last few years, you may have heard the snarky phrase “Go girl! Give us nothing!” As the colloquialism has caught fire, these five simple words have quickly become an ultimate casual criticism for commentary in online fashion communities. However, what many don’t realize is the complex origin of the phrase and how it is representative of a larger transformation of cultural language that has taken place across how we discuss pop culture and fashion as a digital community.
In the year of our Beyoncé’s Renaissance tour, 2023, the phrase has come into sharp contrast with celebrities, like Beyoncé, who have more than proved their talent over a decades long career. Where Beyoncé provides knock-out performances all in countless custom Loewe, Alexander Mcqueen, Balmain, Iris Van Herpen, Ferragamo, and archive Thierry Mugler ensembles, the phrase has become representative of the low standards, and low energy, in which white, often generationally wealthy celebrities, can scrape by without “turning looks'' at every moment.
The phrase’s popularity satisfies the internet’s craving for a sarcastic tagline and a catch-all criticism of celebrity blandness that has been glaringly absent since the likes of Joan Rivers. While the phrase’s LGBTQ etymology has been lost amongst casual internet commentators, “Go girl! Give us nothing!” is becoming impossible to avoid for the terminally online; however its development sheds light on the “queerification” of our day to day language.
When dissecting language that has been, for lack of a better word, “meme-ified” it is necessary to cite the all-knowing pop-culture zeitgeist, Knowyourmeme.com. According to the digital encyclopedia, the phrase “Go girl! Give us nothing!” achieved official meme status on February 28th, 2018 during Dua Lipa’s Britbox performance, which was quickly dubbed by the internet as nothing more than lackluster. Ironically, despite the viral harshness that the performance incited, Dua Lipa, as a result, has revolutionized her stage presence to become one of the world’s biggest pop stars. The phrase then went on to be used to describe other major artists such as Lana Del Rey’s SNL performance and early performances by Jennie from Blackpink, which subsequently popularized the phrase amongst the K-Pop Stan community. In more recent years, the saying has become the ultimate method for critiquing all aspects of fashion performance from the red carpet to the runway. Kendall Jenner, who appears to be in a never ending battle against her “nepotism baby” allegations, is a frequent target of the phrase due to her deadpan stare and “forgettable” runway walk.
This “meme-ified” criticism quickly caught fire amongst the skyrocketing popularity of entertainment such as RuPaul’s Drag Race. In 2018, the show’s viewership jumped drastically, as RuPaul switched Networks from LogoTV to VH1. Following the show’s 2018 season, RuPaul’s Drag Race was ranked 93rd in The Guardian’s top 100 Shows of the 21st century, representing unprecedented queer success in network media on par with global sporting events.
John David Storment, a queer linguist PhD candidate and linguistics teacher at Stony Brook University, explains how language has been impacted by queer culture and African American Vernacular English in recent years. Storment describes that within the LGBT and BIPOC communities, there is a distinct awareness of the appropriation of their colloquialisms. He also explains that the origination of many of these terms including slay, queen, and serve, “come to us from NYC Ballroom culture of the 1980s and/or the Polari dialect of working class queer people in 19th century England. These terms were then popularized for mainstream consumption in the United States via media like Rupaul’s Drag Race,” particularly following the viral success of many of the show’s sound-bytes. Our day-to-day colloquialisms have quickly adopted a multitude of taglines from the show’s viral success (Thank you Miss Vanjie).
In linguistics, the phenomenon we're seeing is called "covert prestige." In Storment's definition of the term, "dialects of low-status groups come to be the ones that influence those of high-prestige groups, not the other way around." Specifically, those from traditionally “high-prestige” groups like white celebrities, will co-opt handpicked cultural cues, such as slang or gold-hooped earrings and acrylic nails, from marginalized identities and popularize them without the risk of experiencing comparable racial discrimination. It’s especially true of black culture amongst American celebrities such as Kylie Jenner’s dreadlocks in 2015 and frequent discussion regarding RuPaul’s Drag Race All Star Raven’s alleged blackfishing.
As far as the rapid “queerification” of our language goes, the rising use of “Go girl! Give us nothing!” in fashion communities, has flourished due to cultural acceleration on TikTok—the more identities and verbal cues that we are exposed to on a daily basis, the more susceptible our language becomes to other people’s mannerisms and phrases. Fashion creators on the app, such as @Ideservecouture and @Fashionboy, have leaned into commentary as their most popular form of content, with short-form snarky reviews for red carpets and editorials often performing best in the app’s algorithm.
Despite the app’s video only format, fashion fans continue to seize full use of the phrase when ranking runways, again often referencing Kendall Jenner as the lowest bar for “giving nothing” alongside High Fashion Twitter’s arch-nemesis Virginie Viard’s Chanel. Storment adds that doom scrolling, “paired with the fact that content from BIPOC and queer communities are heavily commodified and therefore promoted by social media algorithms to people who wouldn’t normally be exposed to the speech of those communities, means that apps such as TikTok are a hotbed of language and innovation and change.”
The progressive development of our language, when not misappropriated, is not necessarily a bad thing and it often occurs without notice, hence how the now inescapable nature of “Go girl! Give us nothing!” has caught hold within the digital fashion community. Perhaps the tides are turning, as Margot Robbie on the Barbie Press tour, has decidedly “slayed” and “given us everything”.
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