Do you consider yourself to have “brainrot”? When you say slay, do you mean the kind of thing Buffy does to vampires, or do you mean you’re actually doing really well? Does a “ship” make you think of the Titanic or Challengers? Depending on your answer to those questions, you might be fluent in specific slang used on the Internet. But what exactly is Internet slang, and how does it develop?
Michael Adams: That’s where slang kind of comes in. Because slang probably predates standard varieties of English, but it’s certainly antagonistic towards standard language etiology. What it’s basically saying is, everyday language is insufficient to express what I intend to express. So I’m going to express myself in a different way, right. And that’s going to be with this new word, or this new phrasing, or this type of emphasis or a strange pronunciation, or whatever it is, right? And those things can become trends. And then they get stale, or they can be ephemeral, because we’re not invested in each word that we use, but then some of them end up sticking around for a good long time. And some of them even end up becoming standard items of colloquial speech.
That was Professor Michael Adams of Indiana University, who has studied slang, specifically its use in social contexts. Words like OK and cool started out as slang terms, but according to Adams, they aren’t anymore. Once a slang word enters our collective lexicon, it loses that crucial aspect that made it what it was: that only a few people understood it. So that time I had to explain to my roommate that “rattling the bars of my enclosure” means you really like how someone looks was an example of slang on a particular corner of the Internet.
Adams started investigating the language of the Internet when he developed SlayerSlang, a dictionary of terms that fans of the TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer used on Internet forums and occasionally in real life. Although the show premiered in the late 90s, it popularized a lot of internet-speak we barely even notice today.
MA: One thing that’s true of Buffy is that it amplified our tendency to use the suffix that we spell -y. Right, um, to make adjectives where you wouldn’t expect them. Now this is by far not alien to English. Cloudy is an old English word, right? So you know, it’s not as though that capacity isn’t well established in the structure of English.
But Buffy just had it all over the place. And you get these forums that, you know, people would say, oh, you know, that’s because it’s in a TV show. Nobody would ever say that in face-to-face speech. Something like crayon break-y, or Heart of Darkness-y. See, right? These are both authentic items of slayers slang, right? But who would say those in real life?
With a simple syllable tacked onto the end of a word, suddenly anything’s an adjective. And with the freedom the Internet provides you, you’re free to do whatever you want with it, and leave a written trail for others to find and follow.
MA: So this is where the internet comes in. And digitally mediated communication, right? Yeah. You are speaking but you’re writing too. Two registers suddenly combined, in a way they hadn’t before writing formal speeches in formal. Well, what do you do when you’re on the internet, you’re writing, but you don’t want to be formal, because the social setting in which you’re writing says that you should be informal. Some of those settings say you should push the envelope as far as you can, in what’s formal or non-formal, right? Because that might be in the interest of group identities on the one hand, or one’s identity within a group.
Medill junior Alijah Hill’s favorite piece of Internet-derived slang demonstrates this contrast well:
Alijah Hill: My favorite piece of Internet slang is epic. I love throwing it on the end of every single sentence. You know, it’s really versatile. Somebody says like, Oh, I got I got this for you Epic. You know, somebody says like, hey, actually your assignment got turned in late and you got 40 points deducted. epic.
Words like epic, which used to be reserved for things that were well, epic, like poems that were 15,000 lines long, are now everywhere on the internet. Adams demonstrated this with his -y suffix phenomenon.
MA: Well, I tested this one time. I sat down, I gave myself an hour. I did this for several hours on different days. I sat down for an hour, and I started with a word that I thought should not ever have the -y suffix. And I found it online. Wow. And I could do that for an entire hour and come up with things.
Jesus-y. Cathedral-y, BLEEP-y. All words Adams has found on the Internet, and all words that we might have a TV show about vampire slaying to thank for. In fact, a lot of internet words or trends have their roots in surprisingly early pop culture phenomena.
MA: Shipping, I can tell you almost exactly when it emerged because I was a contributing editor to the Barnhardt dictionary companion at the time, it was a quarterly journal of new words. And I wrote the entry for shipper. And so it would have been about looking up at the bookshelf. 1999, it would have been a new-ish word that we felt we had to do a full treatment on. So you know, there was that shipping and a lot of shipping at the time was slashing (me: uh huh, slash fic.). Right, right. Which came out of a fan fiction tradition. Yeah, even before fan fiction really had a digital platform on which to rest, you know, but that was already going on. It was famously going on with Star Trek. Shipped relationship of all was between Kirk and Spock.
Another generator of word-y innovation is strict character counts. Snappy phrases and easy-to-remember callbacks reign supreme on apps like Twitter and Instagram.
MA: That pressure forced people to come up with what you are all too familiar with, which is all kinds of initialisms and acronyms that people use, because “idk” counts as one,but if you said I don’t know, that would take up half of your characters in your tweet, right? So I mean, you had to figure out ways to economize on that type of shortening. A very efficient way. And then also, there’s the extra expressivity of it. It’s like I don’t even have to say it the right way. I get to say it in this other way, which is really cool.
In order to match the stingy character counts, and then perhaps to fit their thoughts into the shrinking attention spans of online denizens, people on the internet condense their thinking into innovative, compact words and sentences. That could be why elaborate, huge words like “biblically” can come into play – they say a lot without using as many characters as an entire sentence.
The language of the Internet is constantly shifting, as words get picked up, recycled, and remixed to fit our communication. But Adams brought up an important way we get new words: by picking up linguistic patterns from communities that aren’t part of the mainstream. However, there are a lot of pitfalls that can occur when that happens.
MA: The problem is when a white-focused group identity depends on language appropriated from black language, you know, then the question is, how is that your language and not my language? And race troubles in America make that a really salient question. Why is it that you are using this word that comes out of my culture, true to your word, and then because of your majority dominance over the language, somehow whitewashing it right? In a way that deprives me of my expression? And when that’s a question of two groups in a university dorm, or two groups at a high school, that is a relatively trivial question, but when it’s a matter of race and ethnicity, or the broad spectrum of gender and sexual identity differences right. Then I think it really becomes kind of incendiary at times, and rightly so.
MA: On the one hand, I think you have to be realistic, and accept that language works that way. On many different planes of usage at the same time. So it would be unusual if white folks didn’t appropriate the language of other people, when they come into contact with it would be very unusual. But what’s politically at stake, and what’s at stake in expression? Those are real issues. And people pay a cost in appropriation, it’s just not the people who appropriate the word. It’s the people from whom it’s appropriated that pay the cost.
Adams brought up some specific instances of this: the word “bro,” now the purview of everyone from surfers to video gamers, was originally a word mostly Black men referred to each other with, as a shortened version of “brother.” Another one Adams noticed involved the way women spoke to one another in casual conversation.
MA: There were a couple of instances I had seen. They were television instance, they weren’t face to face instances, where it was clearly being proposed that one woman could call the other woman a BLEEP in the same way that appropriated from black language, people felt they could talk to a close friend with the term of endearment, BLEEP, yes, some black people would say is not a good look on white people and should not be done. But lots of white speakers paid no attention and started doing that. So you’ve got like white guys walking into a room and saying, what’s up BLEEPs?
Adams hypothesizes that the rise of babygirl (all one word, used as an adjective) is another example of this phenomenon. Often applied to people or celebrities that would not traditionally be classified as babies or girls, the term is one of endearment. Adams says he often gets it from his daughter.
MA: She’ll say, ‘Oh, baby girl. I feel so bad for you know’, that type of thing. Yeah. That’s alternated with ‘Dad, you are so old’. Yeah, yeah. Got a baby girl reference and feel a little bit better for myself.
Another pattern of slang mirrors the way retro clothes come back in style after a few years.
MA: you don’t use the same slang as your parents. That is the basic slang taboo. You don’t use your parents’ slang and your parents had better not dare use your slang. Mm hmm. But grandparents and grandchildren kind of cycle around again and it becomes kind of cool. Or maybe the kids just don’t even know that the grandparents said this. But these are words that are available. And they selected those words instead of the words their parents use. Just had a great example of this. Yesterday, we went to my daughter’s sixth grade promotion to middle school. So we’re there in the gym, and we’re having the ceremony and everything. And their favorite teacher, Mr. Summers, was talking about them all, and how much he’d learned from them. Yeah. And then he said, like, skibidi rizz. And they all went wild, right?
Words like “pookie,” which has been a term of endearment since 1900s, come back around into common usage again.
MA: Part of what you’re seeing, which is only natural, is that the concept or the category, persists. ways of addressing it change. Things can’t always be the same. Or you won’t be you, right, you won’t have anywhere where you can put yourself into it. Yeah, so that’s where you get your blends with Renaissance or your pookie, or the funny thing about pookie is that it’s old — pookie is not new.
So because it’s got a new use, right? It’s, okay, to give it a Pookiessance.
Another category of internet-speak is the portmanteau, or combining two words into one. In honor of the Internet’s portmanteau usage, I read this censored tweet to Professor Adams.
[tweet]
MA: That’s very poetic. What that person did in that Yeah, right. And now It’s not a poem. Right? And the speaker isn’t proposing that it’s a poem. And it doesn’t observe formal poetic structures, or anything like that. And an audience isn’t going to take it as a poem, if it’s not proposed rhetorically as a poem. But it’s nonetheless poetic. Yeah. Right. And and that’s the poetic impulse and every speaker that that creativity bubbling up into everyday speech, and every once in a while one of those words will be useful enough to stick.
Words can also drift into different, small communities and get tweaked before being sent back out into the world with an ever-so-slightly different meaning. We talked about how the word “smut,” which technically means any type of pornography, has now been changed to mostly mean romance novels and other books of that kind.
MA: You don’t have to hit the language with a sledgehammer to make it into something new. Right? Yeah. Just a slight difference in meaning. Yeah, I were somebody who grew up with Tom Lehrer, a wonderful comedic songwriter who you wouldn’t know anything about, who wrote a great song called smut about how he loves it, right? But that was in the 1960s 1967. The year that was, that was the year that was is the name of the album that song appears on. And it’s a joyous song – smut. How I love to be smut.
[Smut by Tom Lehrer]
MA: but you’re right, at that time, it meant Playboy magazine and Penthouse magazine, or a bodice Ripper, as we used to call them. Real, you know, fiction of that kind. So you can see the connection, but it had a broader significance. Yeah, it’s in the fanfiction world. Yeah. It’s just that little tinkering. And that’s all you have to do sometimes, to make the word yours and expressive of what you have to say.
So whether words like slaying, Pookie, and rizz make any sense to you now, you might find yourself in a situation in the near future where nothing quite expresses how you feel like they do.
For WNUR News, I’m Mika Ellison.
