The chords of OutKast’s “Hey Ya” began to play and a text banner flashed: “Welcome To Simp Nation.” It read: “If she rants to you about her relationship problems and you comfort her,” while Post Malone’s “Rock Star” played. 16, he posted a video that showed him posing beneath a block of text. That usage only became popular on TikTok in 2019, and may have peaked thanks to a trope made popular by Marco Borghi, whose account, has more than 2 million followers on the platform. It’s a person, often a man, who throws money or attention at someone else, often a woman, in order to win their affection. The word’s current definition isn’t too far from Too Short’s.
Simp became a staple of men’s rights forums, where feminism is derided as weakening men - just waiting for an enterprising TikToker to dust it off and give it a new sheen. In the early 2010s, the word, still used with some regularity by rappers, was seized upon by members of the nascent “manosphere,” the world of men’s rights activism. The 1982 B-movie “Penitentiary II” even had a character named Simp. Too Short said that he may have drawn it from 1970s Blaxploitation movies, where the word thrived. He added that it evoked the sense of something counterfeit: “Like you’re a knockoff pimp.” C., Too Short and E-40, started using it in their songs. A set of West Coast rappers who regularly addressed pimping, including Hugh-E. That newer sense of the word - as an insult for being “soft” or “overly sympathetic,” particularly to women - became more prominent in the 1980s and early 1990s. “Not the other way it’s been used as a very soft kind of man, who is very soft to his female friends.” “Simp would have been used in an old-school way,” he said. Adebayo said he had used it to inject an old-fashioned noir tone into the book. The most recent entry in the dictionary dates to the 2000 novel “My Once Upon a Time,” by the British novelist Diran Adebayo, where “simp” appears twice in the first 20 pages. The dictionary lists its first known usage as 1946, though it appeared in The New York Times as early as 1923. The “New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English,” defines it as a shortened version of simpleton, so the phrase’s original meaning is rooted in calling someone stupid.