Ting (n)

Means: Thing

Usage: “For real, Miss cleared my desk and threw out my tings”

A single dropped letter. Doesn’t seem much, but as we know, if the Yoof can get away with putting their linguistic feet up for a second, they will. This knowingly lethargic pronunciation may have grown out of traditional Jamaican terminology (so popular, in fact, that it has been the reassuring brand name of a tasty grapefruit drink in the Caribbean since the Seventies), but it’s now used internationally to describe most generalities in a suitably general way. In fact, “ting” has become so common that it is regularly used as an adjunct to simply regulate conversation flow (“I was doing my revision and ting and before I knew it I fell asleep”), the unemployed actor of Yoofspeak, sounding nice to the ear but without any real grammatical job to do. As Ronan Keating almost said once, “You say it best when you say nothing at all... and ting.”