FACTS and FAM – AMERICAN SLANG

FACTS and FAM – AMERICAN SLANG

FACTS.

Today is the last video in the summer of slang

video series.

Today, we’re learning ‘facts’ and ‘fam’

and in addition to these 2 slang terms,

we’re also learning something interesting about consonant clusters with T.

Let’s start with fam, family.

Both terms can be used to mean your people,

your friends, your community, the group that’s

important to you.

Rachel’s English community, you are my family.

If you were texting a group of friends to

get together, you might say: Hey fam!

What are you doing tonight?

You really like the girls on your basketball

team, don’t you?

Yeah.

They’re my fam.

A couple pronunciation things here: We have

the AA vowel followed by the M consonant.

So that changes the AA vowel a little bit,

it’s not pure, it morphs into an UH sound:

Faa— aa-uh, aa-uh, fam, fam.

Fam. It’s not a pure AA, aa, faaaam.

But fam, aa—aa—fam.

Now, with ‘family’, most people will make

that a two-syllable word, FAM-ly. FAM-ly.

It can also be three syllables: FAM-uh-li.

And a lot of non-native speakers do that.

But I suggest you stick with just two syllables,

I think it sounds much more natural.

Family.

Family.

Family.

Fam.

Use these terms with people you love, you

feel really connected to.

Now, FACTS.

This one came to me through a friend who works

in a high school.

He says it’s being used as a response, an

affirmative response.

For example: That’s a dope sweater.

Facts.

I did a little search on #facts on Instagram

– always an amazing way to add context to the meaning of slang.

#facts has over 11 million public posts.

It’s used to be definitive.

It’s like: What I’m saying is true.

I think it can also be used to show defiance.

It’s like, you say that, but I say this.

And I say, facts.

Because I don’t care what you say.

Check the link in the video description to

see all of these public posts on Instagram

and explore them.

See if you can build nuance for your understanding

of the word and use of FACTS.

Also, in writing it’s common to put this

in ALL CAPS.

Let’s talk about the pronunciation.

In American English, we often drop the T between

two other consonants.

We do that here most of the time.

Facts.

Facts.

I think once in this video, I did a really

light T release: facts.

But usually, we just say: facts.

Facts.

So don’t think about trying to make a T

sound, just make KS.

Facts.

When you do this, it will sound just like

this word: fax.

That’s okay.

Context is there to helps us tell the two

words apart.

So we often drop the T between 2 other consonants.

A couple other common words in which we can do this:

directly, directly.

I’m not saying the T there.

It comes between 2 consonants.

Exactly, exactly!

Perfectly, you did that perfectly.