If everybody gets to say it, nobody has to understand it
While reading Nancy Doyle’s book, Learning From Neurodivergent Leaders, I leaned back a little when she used the word “unalive” to describe her struggles with mental health. Her statement — a deep, powerful, and resonant analysis on the weight of grief — instantly lost its power.
I could understand if we were trying to skirt past the algorithm on TikTok. Or if I were talking to my middle school-aged cousin. But this wasn’t the language I expected to hear from an academic in a psychological text, no less. I initially questioned her choice of wording. Why use “unalive” when “death” was equally, if not more, appropriate?
I soon realized that I do it too. Responding “period” to affirm a coworker’s Teams message or bringing an online meme into a real-world context. Our approach to everyday language has shifted into something so algorithmic. TikTok has become an etymological source, bringing with it the collapse of context.
The acceleration of online words getting offline meanings not only causes semantic dilution but also leaves subcultural communities holding fragments of their own creations. Flattened into a trend. The words may not be lost, but control is.
The DoubleClick:
If everybody gets to say it, nobody has to understand it.
In the early 2000’s, regionality determined what you said, what music you listened to, and what you wore. You could instantly identify someone based on the cultural codes they embodied. You’d never hear the word “jawn” outside of Philly, never see a candy-painted Chevy outside the South. While television and music may have popularized many of these signatures, it was unmistakable who held the source.
Today, virality has erased those boundaries. It’s not uncommon to hear your cousin in Texas say, “you moving mad weird,” embodying New York lingo, or your heterosexual white coworker tapping two fingers together, telling you to “clock it”. The interconnectivity of the online world means words and codes travel faster than their meaning can — and further than their community intended.
What used to take years to cross state and cultural lines now only takes hours to go global, hitting your grandma’s Facebook feed in a matter of months. As the wildfire spreads, it is actively erasing the languages that communities like ballroom culture and AAVE have built.
Other times, it’s spreading harmful, and sometimes dangerous, rhetoric without knowledge or care about its origins. It’s how words like looksmaxxing or Tradwife, born from incel and alt-right forums on platforms like 4chan, get sanitized and repackaged as trends. Making it easy to rebrand them as harmless lifestyle choices, TikTok hype, and brandable content.
Adam Aleksic elaborated on the mechanism by which internet language became so monolithic in his TEDxPenn talk and how social media is changing the way we talk. The answer is hidden in our relationship to algorithms. Like a game of telephone, the algorithm sees a code, interprets its high usage as a trend, and spreads it wide enough for people to latch onto it and boost its popularity.
But algorithms have no social code. It’s not bound to preserving culture or protecting nuance. All it needs to know is that people want this, and what they want it will give them more of it.
Digital lexicons are here to stay. Their adoption into the mainstream means that soon we’ll all speak one universal flattened dialect built by algorithms, ripped from communities. The question isn’t whether it’s coming; it’s already here. The question is, how much further will it go?
When words mean everything and nothing all at once, we inherit a language that’s consumable by anyone, and seemingly owned by no one.
