My grown-up friends don’t use based in its new slangy sense, so I asked Veronica (whom I still think of as a child) what it meant. ‘It’s a Millwall thing,’ she said, chanting: ‘No one likes us. No one likes us. No one likes us. We don’t care.’
I’m not talking about the established sense, as in based on fact (generally meaning ‘fictional’) or evidence-based (which entails choosing your facts), but about a usage that has jumped in the past decade from the hippity-hoppity world of Lil B to the fringe reality of the alt-right.
Thus, in response to a newspaper headline last month about a black Republican politician in North Carolina — ‘Lt Gov Robinson: Heterosexuals superior to homosexuals, who serve no purpose’ — someone on Twitter exclaimed: ‘Holy mother of based.’ Another tweet remarked out of the blue: ‘Buddhism is kinda based when you think about it.
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