Our viral vocabulary

Fascinated by words, Adam Aleksic ’23 created a blog to write about their origins when he was in ninth grade. After graduating from Harvard with a concentration in linguistics and government, he became known online as the Etymology Nerd, a self-described influencer who has more than 3 million followers on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube combined.

In this edited interview, Aleksic talks about his recently published book, “Algospeak: How Social Media is Transforming the Future of Language,” which explores algorithms’ influences on language and culture.

Compared to other developments such as writing, the printing press, and the internet, what is unique about how social media is transforming the way we communicate?

I’m a big believer that the medium is the message. The way the information is being diffused is going to affect how we communicate. For example, with the arrival of writing, there was this big shift away from us telling stories with rhyme and meter. Plato said that writing was going to make us worse at remembering things. With the printing press, information is diffused more quickly, and more people have the ability to be literate, but there are still gatekeepers, which is affecting who gets to tell the story. And then the internet allows us to lose the gatekeepers; anybody can tell the story now, and that’s another paradigm shift in language. Algorithms are a new paradigm shift because the centralization of the internet that occurred in the late 2010s, coupled with how these algorithms push content through personalized recommendation feeds, are changing how we understand the very act of communication.

What role do algorithms play in the evolution of language?

Algorithms are shaping the way we speak. Platforms’ priorities play an important role in organizing and shaping how our language develops. The algorithm pushes more trends, creates more in-groups that then create new language. New trending words are amplified by social media; creators replicate words that they know are going viral, because it helps them go more viral, and then they push the words more into existence. This is the cycle that we’re constantly in. I think it’s because of the algorithm, which amplifies trends, that we’re getting more rapid language change than before. The biggest takeaway from my book is that algorithms are deeply affecting our society right now, and we should be paying attention to them.

When explaining the role of algorithms and influencers in making certain words popular, you write that “algorithms are the culprits, influencers are the accomplices, language is the weapon, and readers are the victims.” Can you unpack this?

When I say algorithms are the culprits, I mean that they are, in this metaphor, responsible for the perpetuation of slang at this speed, and influencers are being accomplices because we’re playing a part. The algorithm doesn’t do anything by itself; it doesn’t come up with the words or spread the words by itself. It’s humans who are doing that, with our own ideas of what the algorithm is or should be, and that pushes the words faster than otherwise. Eventually, those words enter your vocabulary, and that, I guess, makes you the victim.

How do some words created by social media — such as “skibidi” (nonsensical expression), “delulu,” (delusional) and “unalive” (kill or die) — get added to dictionaries?

How did they even get there in the first place is the kind of the question that I’m trying to answer with my book. As I’ve said, trending words are amplified by social media’s algorithms and influencers. How some words are getting added to dictionaries? Lexicographers go by if words have sustained usage; if they’re used at a large enough scale that they’re culturally important words, meaning that a lot of people know what they are; they’ll add them.

What concerns you about the way social media and its algorithms are changing language?

As a linguist, I have no concerns because language is the means by which humans connect with one another. As a cultural critic, I’m pretty concerned by the way in which language is more commodified than ever before, and I’m concerned that certain groups are influencing our language more than other groups, like incels. Words that are part of the incel vocabulary like “pilled,” “maxxing,” or “sigma” are very popular. For example, if I like burritos, I can say, “I’m so burrito-pilled,” or if I want to eat more burritos, I can say “I’m burrito-maxxing.” The fact that we are using these words is an indicator that this culture is influencing us, and it also indicates that the way ideas spread and percolate in the online space can be dangerous. Incels are incredibly misogynistic and have a worldview that causes them to dehumanize other people. They have been able to spread their ideology because of the nature of the internet right now. If we pay attention to how language is changing, we should also pay attention to how culture is changing.

As a linguist, I’m very excited to see that language is developing faster than before. To me, language is almost a form of resistance. Every single new meme that emerges is a reactive cultural force to the over-organization of society. This summer, the term “clanker,” which is a speculative slur for artificial intelligence, became very popular. In March, we saw “Italian Brain Rot,” a meme that uses AI subversively to generate ridiculous cartoon characters. Both of these memes create a commentary about our current state of technological progress. A lot of memes and slang words are emerging in reflection to our current cultural moment. There’s something really beautiful about that.