Welcome to the latest teen-girl parlance—a TikTok-trend spinoff that’s become the new language of casual, constant joking used to poke fun at each other, and one’s self, for eating.
And while many teens say the jargon is simply meant to be playful, others admit they find it hurtful, or at least jarring. Experts find the explosion of this kind of slang alarming.
“This is a problem for everybody,” says Zöe Bisbing, a body-image and eating-disorders psychotherapist. “It has a lot to do with this really, really entrenched anti-fat bias in our culture that normalizes microaggressions toward fat people.”
Complicating the problem, though, is that the jokes are made by and about thin girls.
“With this new language, they’ve given each other permission to comment not only on weight but on eating itself. So there’s nothing good about this,” Barbara Greenberg, a teen and adolescent therapist based in Connecticut who is familiar with the terminology, tells Fortune. “It’s going backwards.”
Chanea Bond, a Texas high school English teacher and education influencer, tells Fortune she was disturbed as she watched the trend pick up steam before summer. “It started this school year. At first it was mostly students referring to themselves. But now ‘big back’ it’s so common in their vernacular, they say it anytime there’s eating happening. Also, ‘You’re a fatty.’ ‘Fatty’ has definitely come back,” she says. “I definitely wish it would go away.”
Never was that truer for Bond than it was earlier this week, when her 6-year-old daughter came home from daycare and asked, “Mom, do I have the biggest back?” After some digging, Bond learned her kid had been told by the teacher that she had “the biggest back” after asking for extra crackers at snack time.
“I asked if it hurt her feelings. I told her that her body is proportional, and that if she wants extra snack, she’s allowed to eat extra snack without someone commenting on her body,” says Bond, who shared the exchange with her daughter on X, where it’s been viewed over 1.3 million times, prompting a slew of supportive responses.
This ‘big back’ business is fatphobia. My 6 year old coming home and asking if she has ‘the biggest back’ because she wanted extra crackers at snack time is NOT cute or funny.
Time to wrap it up.
— The Madwoman in the Classroom (@heymrsbond) July 10, 2024
She notes that the young teacher—whom Bond plans on talking to about the situation—is probably not too much older than her students. “I don’t think she meant to be hurtful,” she says. But it showed Bond that the trend, despite her wish that it might calm down over the summer, “is definitely still very much there.”
What ‘big back’ and other terms mean—and how we got here
As with so many troubling trends, the latest form of fat-speak can be traced to TikTok—specifically, to a “big back” video trend (currently with over 174 million posts) that appears to have peaked in the spring. That involved sharing videos with one of two themes: 1) showing yourself eating a lot or someone else eating a lot (typically someone thin) with comments about it being “big back” behavior, or 2) stuffing your clothes to make your back (or even a baby’s) appear larger and then either running to get food or, once again, just eating.
But what does “big back” actually mean? That’s where things get complicated, as many have noted that the term and possibly the trend appear to have roots in African American English (AAE) and in Black spaces online. But the trend is “pretty new, so there hasn’t been a bunch of research done on it,” says Kimberley Baxter, linguistics PhD candidate at New York University who specializes in AAE.
NYU professor of linguistics Renee Blake says that the term has roots in the “Black London community, meaning ‘derrière’ in a positive light,” and that it only became negative through appropriation.
Baxter theorizes that “big back” became “a term to be levied at all fat people, but also towards people who engage in stereotypes associated with fatness,” and that it has connections with the term “bad built” as well as the old-school “built like a linebacker.” She observes it was propelled across social media recently in part by reactions to a popular TikTok series by Reese Teesa.
Its origins have prompted some—including a therapist who goes by Therapy Dojo on TikTok—to say that current uses of “big back” feel like “cultural appropriation,” and can make white criticisms of the trend feel like the “policing of Black culture.” That’s despite the therapist’s belief that the term, on its face, is “absolutely fatphobic.”
Lizzo has even weighed in, calling the trend “horribly fatphobic,” but noting that the term was just “something Black people say” and that it wasn’t until it “got turned into a trend” that it got “out of control,” with people using it “in a harmful way.”