The Story Behind the Ubiquitous Phrase Men Suddenly Cannot Stop Screaming (2024)

In a recent TikTok video, 35-year-old Kevin Spies, who’s from the Chicago suburbs and posts on the platform under the username “grillguy_,” stands in his garage and counts his blessings. The clip is titled “Guys in Their 30s Celebrating Literally Anything,” and in white text that splays across the screen, Spies annotates the mild domestic victories that define the lives of so many men who are approaching their midlife doldrums: “Sports Team Wins.” “Wife Brought Home a Sandwich.” “Tax Rebate.” “Toddler Asks to Take a Walk in the Park.” Spies reacts in the exact same way for each of these fatherly spoils: flexing, fist-pumping, and shouting the words LET’S GO—or occasionally the more profane variant, LET’S f*ckING GO—at the top of his lungs.

The joke here is that, lately, men of Spies’ age and disposition have reduced the wild color of the English dictionary to exactly one exclamation: Let’s go (sometimes abbreviated LFG, or “Let’s f*cking go”). The phrase, which is the sort of thing children say after going down a slide, has brutally assimilated into their lexicon; the evidence is everywhere, from baseball players to Twitch streamers to the raucous din of your local campus bar. Yesterday I opened my Instagram account and was even greeted by an image a good friend of mine had posted, a snapshot of the Don DeLillo novel Mao II. The caption? You guessed it.

Clearly Let’s go has become a hinge point for the male vocabulary, a shortcut for all intragender communication. The term is utilitarian, flexible, and fundamentally meaningless; it’s another way to say, “Yes, a thing exists.” I first started noticing its encroachment about three years ago, when suddenly every sentence that came out of my mouth seemed to be punctuated in the exact same way. Did I engineer a deft maneuver in a board game? Let’s go. Did my girlfriend and I settle on a takeout order? Let’s go. Does the bloodwork look good? Let’s go.

This was not a conscious choice, and it wasn’t for Spies either. Oftentimes, when a semi-involuntary Let’s go emerges from his mouth, he finds himself concerned about the part of his brain that controls speech.

“I don’t know what else to say when I’m excited about something,” he told me. “I wouldn’t be like, ‘Oh, yes!’ I don’t even think about it. Let’s go just comes out, and it doesn’t make sense. Like, ‘Let’s go’? What does that mean? I’m just flabbergasted by it.”

Dictionary.com notes that in the final line of Shakespeare’s 1594 play The Comedy of Errors, Dromio of Ephesus says to his brother, “Now let’s go hand in hand, not one before another.” In the late-Renaissance definition of the term, Let’s go functioned as a colloquial edit of the more grammatically sound let us go—as in, going to a specified destination, which uses a normal, uncorrupted incarnation of the verb. But Doug Harper, author of the Online Etymological Dictionary, suspects that the subject/predicate soundness of the phrase became more tenuous by the 20^th century, when Let’s go was adopted by a fleet of American sports teams and military platoons as an informal fight chant. “Organized college sports evolved in the decades after the Civil War,” he said. “Let’s go also feels military—a platoon leader urging his men over the top and into action.” (For instance, consider this 1942 World War II recruitment poster that urged us to “Fight! Let’s Go! Join the Navy.”)

That rah-rah, beer-drinking, sports-watching heritage of Let’s go certainly lends itself to the overwhelming male acclimatization of the term today. This was burnished by the manic rhythms of early amphetamine-fueled Ramones singles, Shania Twain anthems, and DaBaby taunts, all of which helped transform the phrase into an airheaded salute to Going Out. That’s to say nothing of the MAGA malapropism “Let’s Go, Brandon,” which infected it with a delirious political verve.

But if you want to point to a specific time and date when Let’s go was fully deconstructed into filler patois among the boys writ large, our best bet might be March 3, 2020, when a Twitter user named @gofthejungle23 tweeted this image—a screaming cartoon tennis ball embossed with the words LET’S f*ckING GOOOO—into existence. The “Let’s Go” Ball, as it’s now known, quickly metastasized across the internet and elevated the term into both a meme and fodder for commentary. Today the term, and the meme, serves as an informal mantra for several dude-coded hobbies—especially gaming—but it’s really become endemic. Slowly but surely, everyone began to realize that the men in their life were stuck in an interminable let’s go loop.

“Let’s gooooo is the male equivalent of slay,” wrote comedian Chris Aileo earlier this year in a hugely viral tweet. Another Twitter user, @Whoabot, was a little more forgiving in 2022, when he noted: “Men sure love yelling ‘let’s gooooooo’ at literally anything that goes the slightest bit positively.” (For @Whoabot, these incidents include finding an 11^th nugget in a McDonald’s 10-piece, and cooking a take-and-bake pizza to perfection.)

“It has a slightly cringe quality to it,” said Don Caldwell, editor in chief of the invaluable resource KnowYourMeme, when I asked him why he thinks Let’s go has become so inescapable. “There’s a little bit of irony going on there. It’s a stereotypical bro term, which I think is the point. That’s why it’s used both earnestly and ironically.”

I think Caldwell is largely correct in his assertion. There’s certainly an uber-masculine (and perhaps slightly toxic) quality to Let’s go, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy interfacing with my ancestral frat star from time to time—even if the occasion is, like, a double jump in checkers. To scream Let’s go is to get in touch with the roiling caveman id inside us all, and, in small doses, that can be good for the soul. Case in point: Nicole Holliday, a professor of linguistics at Pomona College, noted that the term ends in a vowel—an O, specifically—which is the ideal ingredient for battle cries of all flavors throughout history (if you might indulge me: Remember the Alamo!).

“We like monosyllables, and both let’s and go are single syllables,” Holliday told me. “O is a long vowel in English anyway—it’s a diphthong. If you want to yell something, you want a vowel sound that you can hold on to for a while. That’s why, when we say it, it’s not Let’s go, it’s Let’s gooooooo!”

Holliday added that a Let’s go facsimile is replicated in all sorts of different languages, and many of them carry the same semantic weight. You can hear Vamanos! on soccer pitches across South America, and the Arabic term Yalla—which can be loosely translated to “Let’s go” or “Come on” or “Hurry up”—is likely the single most common utterance in the Middle East. (Yalla, as you might expect, is deployed at the precipice of joy or anticipation, much like our own Let’s go.) In general, Holliday believes, the Americanized Let’s go has an air of braggadocio to it, a verbal method to toast your successes while still blunting the gaucheness of ego with a glint of brotherhood—remember, in its original diction, the phrase is a contraction of “Let us go.” Craig Elsten, a sports radio lifer who hosts the baseball podcast Padres Hot Tub (and has unleashed more than a few Let’s gos while broadcasting live), concurs with Holliday’s theory. For all of its nonsensical syntax, Let’s go brings people together.

“You’re saying, ‘I’m happy, I’m satisfied with my performance,’ but it’s also for the people around you,” said Elsten. “When you sink that birdie putt in your tournament group, you yell, ‘Let’s go!’ Let’s do this together! It’s something an individual can say that’s an exaltation, but it doesn’t call attention to yourself. You’re not saying, ‘I’m the man!’ Even though Let’s go can mean ‘I’m the man.’ We are a selfish culture, but you don’t want to appear that way.”

Spies, for his part, has made peace with the fact that he will probably be yelling Let’s go for the rest of his life. He possesses neither the tools nor the willingness to decode his brain. He wouldn’t even know where to start. “I can’t run away from it. It’s like how you don’t notice you’re blinking until you think about blinking,” he said. “I think Let’s go will turn into the word cool. It’ll just become another term in our dictionary that doesn’t mean what it actually means.”

I hate to say it, but I totally relate. It’s likely not a good sign that men have disposed of the rest of their verbiage in favor of a nonsense axiom, but as someone who has languished in the anxiety of male-to-male friendships for 32 years—both of you staring at a football game in order to avoid frightening eye contact—I’m glad we finally have something to say when all other words fail us. At last, a fail-safe way to endear yourself to the boys! You can probably guess what that makes me want to scream.