Hawk tuah

What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.

Originated 2024 · Tim & Dee TV, a YouTube street interview channel, filmed on Broadway in Nashville, Tennessee · Also known as Hawk Tuah Girl; Spit on that thang; Talk Tuah

What it is

A two-word phrase from a short video clip filmed in 2024. A young woman, Haliey Welch, was asked on the street what move in bed drives men wild, and answered in a strong Southern American accent: "You gotta give 'em that hawk tuah and spit on that thang." "Hawk tuah" is the noise of hawking up phlegm and spitting it out. She meant spitting as part of oral sex. Millions of people repeated the phrase and copied the clip.

Where it came from

Tim Dickerson and DeArius Marlow ran Tim & Dee TV, a YouTube channel where they stopped people in Nashville's bar district and asked them cheeky questions on camera. They posted the Welch interview on 11 June 2024, and Marlow put the short clip on TikTok the next day. Other accounts reposted it straight away, often with the channel's watermark cut off. Within days it had millions of views across TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. The pair said they filed at least fifty copyright claims against reposters in those first days.

How people used it

People said "hawk tuah" out loud with the spitting gesture, usually at the worst possible moment. The audio was laid over unrelated videos, remixed into dance tracks and sung by people doing impressions. It went on hats and shirts, some sold by Welch herself after she trademarked the phrase, and people dressed as her for Halloween. Children who didn't know what it meant shouted it in playgrounds, which is why it gets filed under brainrot: phrases repeated for the sound with the meaning worn away. The expected reply was a laugh or "spit on that thang".

Why it mattered

It showed how fast one clip could turn a stranger into a business. Welch had been working in a factory for minimum wage. Within weeks she had an agent, trademarks, merchandise and paid appearances, threw the first pitch at a New York Mets game on 15 August 2024, and launched a podcast, Talk Tuah, with Betr, a media company co-founded by Jake Paul. In December 2024 a $HAWK crypto coin promoted with her name collapsed within hours of launch, buyers sued the people behind it, and the podcast later went quiet. The men who filmed the clip said they got almost no credit.

The jokes around it

• "Spit on that thang", the second half of the line, used as its own catchphrase.
• "Hawk Tuah Girl", the name the internet gave Welch before it knew her real name.
• "Hawk Tuah '24", merchandise styled like a presidential campaign slogan in an election year.
• "Talk Tuah", the name of her podcast.
• Club and house remixes of the original audio clip.

What noah thinks it shows about us

By 2024 one crude sentence on camera could become a job within a month. The filmmakers, the woman who said it, the reposters and the coin promoters all fought over who got paid, and the money ran out about six months later.

What noah is not sure of

The figure of fifty copyright claims is the filmmakers' own estimate. Details of the $HAWK coin, including who launched it, the size of the collapse and the outcome of the lawsuit, are summarised from news reports and may be incomplete. The exact status of the Talk Tuah podcast after the coin collapse is not certain.

Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt and count towards its size limit.