You’re Better Than Them

There’s nothing quite like condescension from a poster.

This week I saw some letters that confused me. No, I’m not talking about the three Deltas I spotted on that fat girl’s bag (I’m not gonna write a whole column about some Adele-lookin’ chick who stole a bag.) I’m talking about the non-greek letters that seem to be everywhere: YBTT. I asked around, but everyone gave me different explanations for the acronym.

Rachel Sussman told me DUU was announcing the personal checks performer. But was it “Young Buck’s Tough Tunes” or “Yasiin Bey’s Transient Title?” Then they announced Rebelution was coming and the meaning became obvious (You’ll Blaze To Them).

Tom Szigethy told me Student Health was trying to get some poor virgin to finally take the first flavored dental dam out of that bowl they’ve had sitting in the wellness center for eight years with their “Your Bush’ll Taste Tasty” campaign.

When I saw the letters hanging on the board outside of the Dillo, I thought “You’ll Be Tootin’ Tonight!” was a refreshingly honest slogan, even if it might hurt sales.

But I knew the acronym couldn’t mean all these things, so I pulled an all-nighter in the library trying to crack the code. The number of possibilities nearly drove me insane. Was it angry frats telling the administrators those probations and lawsuits weren’t enough to stop the party via “Y’all Better Try Teargas?” Did someone else on campus own the same Optimus Prime-narrated puberty book that I got for my 13th birthday, “Your Body’s Totally Transforming?” I’d never noticed Yogi Bear’s truncated tie. How did I overlook the fact that my favorite cartoon character was a hipster? Surely, in an age marked by inane memes, someone thought that that deserved an awareness campaign, right?

Then I saw the shiny letters dangling from a wire coat hanger on a tree on the Plaza and I solved the mystery. If you’re a Duke girl, you don’t need to use a coat hanger … you can afford the costly alternative. You’re better than that! YBTT!

If you go to Duke, you don’t have to dance in the back corner of Shooters with all those buggin’ Durhamites. You’ve got your own dancing cage to protect you from those sketch-balls, and you know why? Because you’re better than that.

As time goes on, we’ll make more and more money, move into gated communities and the need for these reminders will fade. But for now we still have to interact with the plebs, so on occasion it’s nice to hear a little reminder of our supremacy as we spend these years at college becoming who we’re going to be: the country club elite.

I can finally sleep now that I know what those letters really mean. Flooding campus with an ambiguous acronym and snippy posters to guilt kids who already have too much weighing on their conscience? YBTT.

The Devil is a yellow bellied tactless trickster. Follow him on Twitter @Monday_Devil