adjective · first recorded 2022 · status: og
Bearish
1.The polite SF way to say something is doomed. Never said to a face, only to a group chat: you are bullish in public and bearish in private, and the gap between the two is the city's actual information economy.
Publicly? Huge fan of what they're building. Privately? Bearish.
01Origin
Like bullish, it escaped finance through crypto Twitter and lost the chart along the way: you can now be bearish on a startup, a neighborhood, a couple, a diet, or a person's whole arc. The finance meaning predicted falling prices; the SF meaning predicts falling status.
Its defining property is where it gets said. Bullish is a reply; bearish is a DM. Public bearishness is reserved for the safely distant (other cities, other industries, the boldly doomed), because being openly bearish on anything local is a social short position with unlimited downside: if you're wrong, everyone remembers, and if you're right, nobody thanks you.
It therefore functions as the courteous alias for ngmi: "I'm bearish" delivers the same verdict with plausible deniability and a finance costume. The truly fluent deploy the hedge ("long-term bullish, short-term bearish"), which means nothing and offends no one, which is the point. Saying either word about your own company is, of course, anti signal.
02Notable sightings
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