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For giggles, I often go back to this post’s responses and comments, but tonight I realised that I actually don’t know what twangitude means.

Google gives me only five results (although that’ll probably soon be six due to this post) of which the top one is the comment in question.

Y’all’dn’t’ve the twangitude to help me out here, would you?

Adám
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  • translating the word unto my native language gives me the word "kabilisan" which means and might have something to do with swiftness. – Archie Azares Dec 26 '17 at 00:02
  • @ArchieAzares How did you translate it to Tagalog in the first place? – Adám Dec 26 '17 at 00:30
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    It's what you develop if you get your knickers in a twist whilst calculating longitude. – Mick Dec 26 '17 at 00:35
  • https://translate.google.com/#en/tl/twangitude – Archie Azares Dec 26 '17 at 00:44
  • @ArchieAzares Azerbaijani: earthquake; Cebuano: twice; Czech: pain; Esperanto: missing; Frisian: compulsion; Greek: complexity; Gujarati: blurred; Hawaiian: status; Igbo: fearful; Indonesian: twitches; Irish: density; Japanese: double corner; Kannada: twins; Kazakh: sorrow; Khmer: borders; Korean: hyperbola; Luxembourgish: compulsion; Macedonian: duality; Malayalam: dungeon; Maori: article; Marathi: strangeity; Mongolian: twice; Pashto: bilateral; Persian: conspiracy; Punjabi: rectangle; Samoan: retention; Gaelic: relationship; Sindhi: of course... Looks like a quirk of machine-learning to me. – Adám Dec 26 '17 at 01:15
  • Is this a real or joke question ? – k1eran Dec 26 '17 at 01:17
  • @k1eran It is real. I really don't know what it means, but I'd like to know. – Adám Dec 26 '17 at 01:18
  • I'd guess: Twangitude = twang (accent) + latitude. I have no source for this, but that's the meaning that jumps out at me, the further / deeper Southern US location the more twangy the accent. – k1eran Dec 26 '17 at 01:20
  • ... and I'd say it's a jokey term perhaps invented by the OP. – k1eran Dec 26 '17 at 01:26
  • looks like this word does not exist – Archie Azares Dec 26 '17 at 01:31
  • quick view of the ngram does not show any result. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=twangitude&year_start=1000&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url= – Archie Azares Dec 26 '17 at 01:32
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    @k1eran Who, me? Certainly not. The first time I saw it was in that comment, and it has clearly been used other places too, each time in a "southern US" context, possibly meaning degree of Southern-ness. Even if it was a joke term, I'd still like to know what it means. – Adám Dec 26 '17 at 01:33
  • @ArchieAzares But it does. Google's search results contain phrases like sheer twangitude and a no-nonsense twangitude and obliquely hinted-at twangitude and her love of twangitude etc. It sure looks like it has a very well-defined meaning to its users. – Adám Dec 26 '17 at 01:35

2 Answers2

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The earliest Google hit I could find for "twangitude" was in an archived chat from 1998. A portmanteau of twang and "attitude," the intervening years haven't exactly pushed the word to the top of the charts, but a few fans, critics, and even composers of country music have found it clever enough to repeat, including a 2012 song by Donna Devine, who rhymed it with "bangitude."

The word embraces three meanings of "twang":

a. A particular guitar sound.

b. A nasal vocal style used by some male country singers — think Willie Nelson — that enables reaching higher notes without falsetto.

c. A regional accent heard from southern Ohio through the Mountain South to Texas affected or retained naturally by the vast majority of country singers — except for Garth Brooks, who was born in Tulsa, which lies outside of twang country.

The meaning would thus be the style, affect, and sound of country music and its performers. Sequins and fringe are likely obligatory.

KarlG
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Rad word. Apparently it is from copyrighted lyrics by Donna Devine. http://indiemusicpeople.com/songs.aspx?SongID=95950

Seems simple enough, refers to the attitude of the twang a country-style rockabilly musician produces with their guitar.

Source: Poison Ivy

Jesse Ivy
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