Are you from Ohio? According to the kids, that’s not good.

There are long-standing profiles of certain states that, for better or worse, will never be able to shake off. California’s association with new age spirituality, New Jersey’s association with organized crime, and Florida’s association with eclectic weirdness via its “Florida Man”-type headlines.

Now, Ohio has one of its own. Are we finally getting credit for being the first to fly? Do kids associate us with airplanes, the Buckeyes, LeBron James or James A. Garfield?

“It was used as a title for anything weird, ridiculous, embarrassing or a little bit absurd. And they’d say ‘only in Ohio,'” said Jen DeLuke, teen librarian at the Brecksville branch of the Cuyahoga County Public Library. She sees firsthand what Generation Alpha — loosely defined as those born in 2010 or later — says and does at work every day.

And all day long you hear the word “Ohio” used as an insult – slang for anything undesirable. Silly, weird, dysfunctional, absurd – all of these words can now be replaced by “Ohio.”

““I started hearing it as a slang term, almost like 2021, 2022, and it started, like all great things, as an Internet meme,” DeLuke said.

DeLuke is based here in Ohio, where Ohioans themselves use it as a negative thing. How widespread is its use?

Hello World

Walter Prendergast is 10 years old and lives in Cheltenham, England.

“My mom is from Cleveland, she grew up here. I’m basically visiting the place where she grew up,” Prendergast said.

Following the recent passing of Prendergast’s grandfather, his mother brought him home to see the place where she grew up. He had been here as a baby, but this was his first trip to the United States with conscious memories.

The children at his school in England warned him before his trip of what awaited him.

“They said Ohio was cursed or something. They said Ohio was in trouble,” Prendergast said.

Jon Malangoni is an Ohio expat living in Finland. He says his fourth-grade son recently came home from school perplexed and was rudely introduced to slang.

“He asked me why ‘Ohio’ meant ‘bad,'” Malangoni said.

Vague origins

It’s difficult to accurately diagnose where the slang comes from, but in this case, many attribute it to Ohio’s anecdotal appearance in news stories that range from the bizarre to the downright disturbing.

There was a case where an amateur fisherman was caught putting weights on his winning catch or a case where a man nearly lost an arm to a bite from his pet zebra. And of course, there is a long list of more disturbing murders and violent crimes that have also occurred in the state and that have captured the national imagination, cases like those of Ariel Castro and Jeffrey Dahmer.

In short, Florida’s long-held title as a hub for strange people and events may have passed to Ohio.

Grant Barrett is co-host of the public radio show “A Way With Words” and says slang is a reaction against the mainstream.

““Slang has the ability to help us identify who belongs, who’s part of the group, who’s part of the same group and where we fit within the group as well,” Barrett said.

That might help explain why even Ohio’s own children have joined in, using their own state’s name as an insult.

Each person’s perception of a place or a style differs wildly from another’s. Yet everyone seems to agree that “Ohio” is a slur. What’s going on? Barrett has an explanation.

“Language spreads the same way other things spread. It spreads through these social networks,” Barrett says.

He said slang follows a similar adoption curve to diseases, and while the underlying technology has changed, the basic mechanisms haven’t. Language is still passed from person to person, but now, with TikTok and other social media, we’re seeing a lot more people using it than ever before.

“What we get from television and social media are new lexical items, new words or phrases, expressions. And this is where slang tends to shine and often has its moment,” Barrett said.

Change of vibration

In this way, slang is passed on and reused among children who may not even be able to find Ohio on a map. It doesn’t matter if they know the origin of the phrase or anything about the state itself.

They just know the vibe.

““A new language is new to everyone. At some point there are people who are ahead, some who are behind, some who are left behind. But there’s always going to be a slope of acceptability and knowledge, and slang is… slippery,” Barrett said. “Slang takes a long time to finally resolve itself into its definitive meanings.”

Katy McAfee is an Ohio expat and reporter for NPR member station KUT in Austin, Texas. She recently discovered the trend and went to the University of Texas campus to see if Gen Zers could shed some light on it.

“It was like a tongue-in-cheek joke, because Ohio is the most boring state in the world,” one young man said.

A young woman interrupted: “Oh! Ohio was making fun of the people of Ohio and the state of Ohio, I’m pretty sure.”

“Because who (expletive) “Do you live in Ohio anyway?” her friend interjected.

Quick burn

The good news for sensitive Buckeyes is that this type of jargon, which has no connection to personal experience, tends to die out faster.

“We have a kind of innate sense of slang. If it appears in mainstream publications or our parents use it, we just know that outsiders have taken over this language; I have to move on to something else,” Barrett said.

So we can expect that “Ohio,” which most kids probably know little about, won’t have the staying power of a word like “cool,” which has survived for decades thanks to its universal understanding.

For his part, Walter Prendergast discovered that his mother’s hometown was nothing like what he had been warned.

“Ohio is very nice, I like Ohio. It’s a little old-fashioned, but I like Ohio,” Prendergast said.

However, only time will tell if their positive vibes can influence anyone else across the pond. Until then, Barrett advises Ohioans to come along for the ride.

“States are making fun of each other. Every state, for example, seems to pick a state next door and say, ‘Oh, they’re worse drivers than us.’ They’re all making fun of each other,” Barrett said.

The recipe is to take it in a spirit of fun, and it may be gone before we know it.

After all, overreacting to a joke? That’s typical Ohio.