In the mid 1800’s, a deluge of new words struck the American vocabulary, infusing it with the rough-and-tumble sound of the high-spirited West. These new words—part of a backwoods dialect called “tall talk”—included rambunctious, conbobberation (a disturbance), helliferocious (extremely fierce), mollagausauger (a stout fellow), and Antifogmatic (rum). Across the South, a flurry of pseudo-latinate words with extra syllables lent jovial flair to everyday speech–”Inscribe” became inscribulate, ”Ruinous” ruinatious, “gossip” gabblement and something fantastic filled you with wonderation. Frontiersman Davy Crockett, who boasted “I can outspeak any man,” coined sanctimoniouslyfied for the overly pious. An 1840 editorial condemned the national Government as ”teetotaciously exflunctified,” (completely worn-out).
Crafting controversial new words is a longstanding American pastime—unlike French and Japanese, which have official departments to determine the legitimacy of words, the English language is notoriously open. In a famous exchange with American lexicographer Noah Webster, an English naval officer named Basil Hall expressed his dismay concerning the many new words he heard while visiting America in the late 1820s. Webster defended the verbal creativity of his countrymen. If a new word proved useful, he asked, why not add it to the vocabulary? “Because there are words enough already,” responded Hall.
The validity of the words, however, is less interesting than what the words that “stick” say about the culture. “The new circumstances under which we are placed,” Thomas Jefferson observed in a 1813 letter, “call for new words, new phrases, and for old words to new objects. Necessity,” he concluded, “obliges us to neologize.” (The Oxford English Dictionary records that, fittingly, Jefferson’s letter is the first known occurrence of the word “neologize!) In other words, the new words we invent speak to the needs, interests, and values of the society which demanded their production.
So what type of words are being produced in our digital Wild West, the “rambunctious” battlegrounds of YouTube shorts and Instagram comments?
It’s difficult to generalize, as they represent the slang and jargon of disparate subcultures, regions, and generations colliding. A surprising amount of the most successful and widespread words, however, deal with social stratification and classification. Social media has created a new arena of competition— and we’ve coined words to describe its status-defining rules.
“Rizz,” the shortened form of charisma and Oxford’s 2023 word of the year, is the most obvious place to start. It’s close cousins with “aura,” a measure of personal magnetism. The long lists of aesthetics, many of which are characterized by the suffix “-core,” continue to proliferate, sorting people into ever-more-precise subgroups with every “micro-trend” wave. “Romanticizing” your life has taken on different shades of meaning, as countless “influencers” promise to guide your “glow-up” into your “main character era.” On the more nefarious side, the “manosphere” pushes you towards “looksmaxing,” which will increase your “sexual market value” and make you an “alpha.”
The overall picture is of a society caught up in an extremely detail-oriented cosmetic craze, tailored to a high level of specificity based on your chosen subculture. Honestly, it’s a little nauseating. It almost makes you nostalgic for the Wild West world that needed words for fights and ferocity! (Or better yet, the early Middle Ages with its proliferation of theological terms.)
For now, it’s generally understood by all but the most dizzyingly online that the social media and physical worlds operate along different lines. Words used earnestly on the internet are considered ironic or “cringe” in normal conversation. And we’ve linguistically recognized that competing in this new social arena isn’t very good for you: it’s brainrot (Oxford’s 2024 word of the year), you’re bedrotting, doomscrolling, or chronically online; you need to touch grass. There’s no worse insult to a new parent than that they’re raising an “i-Pad baby.”
However, as these new words increasingly slip into the vernacular, their ideals will rise in influence. You can only think in terms of your vocabulary—without a word for a concept, it becomes impossible to discuss it. It makes sense that a world made of only pictures and videos would be focused on visual appearance. A vocabulary which orients itself solely around appearances, however, is wildly insufficient for the multi-dimensional nature of everyday life. While slang use is casual, lighthearted, and often funny, it has real implications for the mental categories we sort people into and the way that we—and particularly the “i-Pad babies” who will likely not spot all the layers of irony—describe and understand the world.
Neologizing is a natural part of the evolution of language—without new words, language stagnates and dies. Facing down a list of brainrot terms and the worrying social structures they represent, however, it is tempting to echo Basil Hall: “there are words enough already.”
