As soon as a new viral moment started circulating six months ago, Alex Casey made a choice to avoid it for as long as humanly possible. This is her story.
It’s not that I’m totally ignorant. I know the two words: hawk tuah. I know that these two words relate somehow to a young blonde woman, possibly American, who has now become known as the “hawk tuah girl” online. I know that she has experienced some kind of post-fame controversy after possibly launching a podcast and/or a type of bitcoin, but that’s about it. Like many things born of the internet, I can know lots and lots about it without ever fundamentally understanding it.
Since that viral phrase came swooping like a hawk in-tuah our lives in June, I have been conducting an experiment to see if I can avoid finding out what “hawk tuah” actually means. Despite spending most of my waking life, and the entirety of my working life, on the internet, I have somehow succeeded. Whenever I saw that girl, or the headlines, or the phrase, I would simply turn off the volume, blur my vision as if confronted with a Magic Eye, and scroll past.
Why? I’m not really sure. It’s not like I haven’t been holding space for every other piece of internet junk that the algorithm has tossed over its shoulder this year. I’ve soaked up the brat summer, the Moo Deng autumn, the AI Wonka winter, and the CEO shooter spring, all while trying to stay very demure, very mindful when everyone makes the same joke about how Christina Aguilera “took the substance” and girls on TikTok do their anti-ageing skincare before heading out to tan.
It could be because I can physically feel my own brain disintegrating like a bath bomb due to the internet, and I worry endlessly about all the important things I’m forgetting from the real world. I can’t remember any of my friends’ birthdays any more, but I can still sing every animal’s part in this Youtube edit of Evanescence’s ‘Bring Me To Life’. If I let “hawk tuah” into my brain, what am I going to lose? My dad’s phone number? My already ropey understanding of how tides work?
After conducting some loose research, it appeared the vast majority of people I know also know what “hawk tuah” means. “I hate that I know,” said one colleague. “My tween nieces reference it, which makes me sad,” said another. I’d say there was a little less understanding of the phrase in those over the age of 35, but then my 74-year-old father swooped in to reveal that even he knew what it meant. “I saw it on a number plate online xxx,” he wrote. “Not much passes me by xxx.”
Despite my spoiler warnings, there were still clues in these responses that got me dangerously close to figuring out what “hawk tuah” meant. It definitely didn’t seem like something that people were proud to know (a Slack poll at The Spinoff provoked a deluge of “sad cowboy” reactions). That, combined with the fact it shares a visual style with that clip of the drunk lady who had Covid, makes me think “hawk tuah” is a new a verse from the Lad Bible that I probably wouldn’t like.
I could take some guesses as to what I think “hawk tuah” means on paper. My first guess is that it is some kind of pig latin remix of the phrase “talk to her”. In fact, there have been periods of time this year where I have become so convinced that this is what it means, that I can actually hear Flo Rida saying “lemme Hawk Tuah, lemme Hawk Tuah” at the start of ‘Low’. You may say pig latin is too old-fashioned to go viral, and I’d say look what happened to sea shanties.
A couple of people who didn’t know what it meant also wondered if “hawk tuah” was born of the animal kingdom. Could it potentially be a bird mating dance, or a rare new breed in the Accipitridae family? Others thought it was onomatopoeia related to the act of hoicking, hawking or hocking. Placing this hypothesis alongside people’s general shame around the phrase, it starts to build a really strong case for “hawk tuah” meaning something potentially gross and bodily.
Whatever “hawk tuah” actually means, I hope I never find out. In 2024 it actually feels like a triumph to have protected even a tiny nodule of my smooth possum brain from absorbing another piece of meaningless internet poison. In 2025, I hope to get even more vigilant about it and channel the blissed-out ignorance of Bob Mortimer being asked about his “brat summer”. “What? What on earth does that mean? Brat? Like aggressive? I didn’t have an aggressive summer at all, no,” he said.
“It was very peaceful.”
