the.com/wannabe
Ambition wearing someone else's outfit because its own hasn't arrived yet.
means Someone who desperately imitates or aspires to be a certain type of person without having the genuine credentials, talent, or status to back it up.
from Simply a slurred-together spelling of 'want to be' — first caught in print in 1980s surfer and skater slang, then exploded into the mainstream when 1980s pop press used it to describe fans dressing and acting like Madonna. No hidden root or borrowed word here; it's pure phonetic shorthand, the kind of contraction that happens when a phrase gets said so often it fuses into one lazy, efficient word.
- origin
- from want to be, coined in surfer slang
- spice girls
- turned the insult into a 1996 global anthem
- linguistic twist
- noun born from a verb phrase, no hyphen needed
- the irony
- trying too hard is the one thing wannabes can't fake