Within Reason - #145 The Algorithm is God Now - The Etymology Nerd

Episode Date: March 4, 2026

Get Huel today with this exclusive offer for New Customers of 15% OFF with code alexoconnor at https://huel.com/alexoconnor (Minimum $50 purchase).Come to my UK tour: https://www.livenation.co.uk/alex-o-connor-tickets-adp1641612.For early, ad-free access to videos, and to support the channel, subscribe to my Substack: https://www.alexoconnor.com. - VIDEO NOTESAdam Aleksic, known online as Etymology Nerd, is an American linguist and content creator who produces videos exploring the origins of words. He began exploring word origins in 2016 through his blog. Aleksic studied at Harvard University, where he gained attention for his educational TikTok videos on linguistics and language in 2023. In 2025, he published Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language. - LINKSBuy "Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language": https://amzn.to/3NcOLpw - TIMESTAMPS0:00 – Will Social Media End Local Languages?7:49 – Why Does Language Change?15:11 – What Is Algospeak?22:33 – We Worship Our Phones27:36 – Upcoming Slang to Invest In33:26 – Online Slang That Never Quite Caught On38:48 – Introducing Adam to British Slang47:13 – The Origins of Language57:22 – Punctuation in Text Messaging1:06:24 – The Latin Mass and Hocus Pocus1:13:44 – The Message of Algospeak - CONNECTMy Website: https://www.alexoconnor.comSOCIAL LINKS:Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/cosmicskepticFacebook: http://www.facebook.com/cosmicskepticInstagram: http://www.instagram.com/cosmicskepticTikTok: @CosmicSkepticThe Within Reason Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/within-reason/id1458675168 - CONTACTBusiness email: [e-mail] enquiries: [e-mail]------------------------------------------

Adam Alexic, welcome back to the show. Thank you. So excited to be back. Yeah, the etymology nerd, again, for those who aren't aware. Since we last spoke, you published a book, AlgoSpeak. And we were just talking about how I sort of managed to interview you just before you kind of were doing the press for that. And now again, just after you're doing the press for that. But it's still available. So, you know, check it out in the description.

AlgoSpeak is kind of about the way that social media is influencing our language. People talk a lot about how, like, you know, the dialect of the kids is going down the pan because of the way that the internet is changing how we speak. To what extent do you think social media is just a continuation of the way that young people are always adapting language versus it being, like, actually a distinctive, like, linguistic moment? Yeah, well, I mean, 100% it is both at the same time. There will always be a need among children to differentiate themselves. from adults to build a shared identity for themselves. So that's not new. Kids have always been coming up with new slang.

But I am a strong believer that the medium is the message and that the way that the medium is organized will affect the way we communicate. So when we had more oral tradition, we would tell our stories differently. We would use rhyme and meter. When we had paper, we would segment our stories into chapters. And once we moved to the internet,

we finally had this opportunity for the written replication of informal speech. And algorithms, I think, are similarly, an inflection point kind of comparable to the printing press or to the advent of paper. It is a new medium that uniquely compresses things. And it might be the first time that language is, well, I guess we've had this with print, that there is a industry which controls how we can communicate. But it's more salient than ever.

We have these big tech companies with control and these metrics optimizing for attention. And our language is evolving through their, kind of constraints, their guidances, their things that they're optimizing for become what our language is. And I do want to separate language from culture there. I don't think there's anything inherently bad with language because we are always finding ways to express our reality and share that with other people. But yeah, so kids are always going to be coming up with new slang. But now we have this venue where there's a new opportunity for more slang, more than ever, coming from all these different places, we're more connected than ever. We have all these trends and memes and

social in groups being created that all foster this greater linguistic innovation. You know, one of the most interesting things about writing is that it forces people to standardize, right? There's all of these different dialects and spellings. I think Shakespeare, we have like something like 16 different signatures from Shakespeare, and he like spells his name differently in every single one or something. Because like it sort of doesn't matter, you know, you're seeing all kinds of different spellings. And when people start reading the same material, it just starts to standardize. Social media is like an internet version of this where suddenly people are just like borrowing words from each other, different regional accents, different, even different languages.

Do you think that the sort of global nature of social media will see eventually the elimination of regional language? Yeah. There's always a push and pull. You can't talk about this without mentioning the paradox that, one, at the first, the same time, we do have a language dying out every two weeks is the stat. And there is this mass homogenization toward English. There are 7,000 languages in the world and we're dwindling by the day. Wow. But yeah, it's sad. Mostly it's like Papua New Guinea or it's an Amazon river basin or something like that. National languages, I don't think will ever die out because language is tied to national identity. It's tied to politics. So something like the Thai language is not going away. but like some niche language on the border of like Thailand and Myanmar might go away.

At the same time, we do have all these efforts being made because of the internet to preserve it. And this process was in place because of globalization, because of the increasing centralization of states. This was already going to happen. So internet might be accelerating it, but at the same time, it's giving all these venues for the preservation of language, these discord groups that are trying to keep languages alive. I think that's pretty beautiful. Also with algorithms particularly, there's a lot of, homogenization effect where we do need to compress towards certain standards in kind of a similar

way as you described with the printing press. By Shakespeare's time, there had already been maybe three centuries of people really starting to standardize. And a century after him, I think, pretty much everybody is writing the same way. There's a pressure online to, there's a certain kind of way that's expected of speaking and we need to conform to it. I didn't realize that you said one language disappearing every two weeks? Yeah, I think that's the statistic. That's pretty incredible. I suppose I didn't know that there were like that many languages. I just did a quick calculation and that means that we've got about 270 years left until all languages have gone. So we better start. Well, I'm sure it's it's less of direct. But yeah, it is a sobering kind

of realization that we are definitely moving toward, you know, and we're losing so much. There's There's, uh, everybody should read this book, Braiding Sweetgrass. You know, there's this expression in, um, Pottaught Tommy, um, to be a Saturday that you, that a Saturday could exist as a verb. And there's like ideas, we can't express or don't have the cultural background. I mean, we can't express it, I suppose, you know, but it's, it's, um, ways of thinking are unlocked. Language is like a pair of glasses you can put on a new, new frame for seeing the world. And, uh, where our frames are getting more and more limited, the more languages are compressed. Yeah, philosophers talk about this all the time.

A lot of thought is done in language. And I kind of think that one of the reasons why you get intellectual trend, that there are no new thoughts under the sun, every thought that you've ever had philosophically, someone else has done it and probably better as well. And yet we can still talk meaningfully about like French philosophy and Russian philosophy and English, you know, British philosophy. And I wonder the extent to which that's just to do with language, not just the language barrier of communication, but just the way in which people sort of think. I mean, I've heard that,

I can't remember, maybe I was talking to you about so many words in the development of the English language being due to, like, economics. Like so much about the way we speak is influenced by the necessity we had to describe economic terms, and it's sort of built into our language to the extent that, you know, if the Brits are then the ones coming up with formal, mathematical, logical notation for logic, and the French are the ones writing the beautiful romantic novels, is that just because they're a different culture, or is it literally built into the language

that they are thinking differently about the world? Yeah, I mean, we'll adopt money metaphors when we say things like spend time or save time. I do want to caution against the hard line of this form of thinking, which is linguistic determinism, which is generally accepted to be not true that language does not determine your reality, but it does influence.

I think it is silly to say it doesn't influence your reality. That's linguistic relativism. That it kind of gives you a way of thinking. And perhaps there are some thoughts that end up being thought more because that thought is more able to be expressed. I don't think that's a too unreasonable kind of way of thinking. There's also different intellectual traditions

in these countries, and there's so many other factors you can look at for why certain thoughts developed. There's a lot going on, of course. course. But it's definitely one thing to think about. What are the pressures involved when it comes to the development of language, and how has that changed since the advent of social media? Well, language is a cultural thing. It is also defined by the media we have. So if we have a different reality, our language will evolve

to express that reality. I also, I think you made a point about how no new thoughts are possible. I don't think that's true. I think our reality is constantly shifting. As new situations present themselves, new thoughts can emerge. All these things like AI and algorithms are opening up all these new avenues of philosophy that just didn't exist before. And yeah, sure, people are theorizing about, you know, what if and it, but like now we have this in practice. Now we have, we can observe the effects of these things on our society and we can come up with new thoughts. We can build on the traditions of the past. And, yeah, no thought is completely 100% original, but nothing. thing ever is. You're always trickling down from these sources before you. We're always drawing on

the contributions of others. But I don't think we'll never have new thoughts. Yeah, I mean, to be clear, I think you can definitely have new specific thoughts. Like, I wonder if anybody has ever, you know, people do this, don't they? They try to be like the, the only person to have said a certain series of words in a brand new sentence. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think that's, I think that's fair enough. Unless, of course, the universe is infinite and we're like the, the monkeys with the typewriters. Although, you know this whole thing about the... And one of those monkeys was Shakespeare. Yeah, that is basically the development of mankind from an evolutionary perspective,

an almost infinite series of monkeys tapping away until they hit on the complete works of Shakespeare. You know, they actually, the whole infinite monkeys typewriter writing Shakespeare thing, they actually tested this once. And it turns out that if you put a bunch of monkeys in a room, they show a preference for the letter S and just sort of start. Really? They just sort of start spamming the S key. So even with an infinite amount of time, it's not entirely clear. Looks like a food to them. Maybe it's like, oh, I want to eat this worm, which looks like an S.

I think a thing that is critically overlooked in linguistics is kind of how letters give us feelings. We know about Buba and Kiki that Buba gives us a rounder feeling while Kiki gives us a sharper feeling. There's all kinds of things like that. We know that the name Oakland gives a more Republican vibe, Republican in the American sense. We know that the word, the slough letter combination sounds slippery. We see it show up in words like slimy, slick, sleek, slop, sludge, sled. And all those words are unrelated.

Yet they share that slough. It's called a phonist theme when there's like a sound that kind of has a similar connotation. It evolved in the context of these Germanic languages, which all had it. you add another slow word and you're like, yeah, that feels right because it sounds slippery like all these other words. And we just have this feeling about the slus sound or about individual letters for sure. Do you think like the whole like Boba Kiki thing, which for those who don't know, like, I don't know, you just show the words Kiki and Bober and then show like a pointy image and like a rounded image. And people associate Boba with the rounded one. I want to know to what extent that is because when you say Boba, I can picture the left.

letters and the letters are kind of rounded. It's like a round B and a round O. And in other words, it's supposed to be like kind of cool. It's like, look how this, you just attach this word to this image. But I'm like, maybe it's not that surprising at all. Maybe that's just because it's how the word is like looks written down and Kiki has this sort of sharp kuh sound. Yeah. Well, I mean, the effect is shown to be true across languages with different writing systems. So it's, it's interesting that even, you know, in another script that might have like different ways of doing the the b and the kuss sound will still feel like b is rounder and i mean like look at how every language has the name mama right there's an intuitiveness to the first kind of consonant and vowel we can

articulate which we then associate with our our mothers the first person we interact with um and that tie makes a lot of sense but okay now you're ma that feels like a round comforting thing i was just reading this this um paper on contours and how the the human brain literally reacts more more positively to round things than sharp things. I mean, it makes sense. But like, think about that with architecture, but it also makes sense with language. If certain letters feel rounder,

the c sound literally creates a stop in the back of your mouth, which feels sharp. The b-m-m-feel rounder, because you're using your lips. I think we can't really separate our embodied sensations from how we experience language. I think it's silly. I think a lot of the academic linguistic tradition has tried to treat language as this science,

which is separate from the observer, that we can look at objectively. No, I really think our feelings are a big part of how we do language. There's like a biological aspect to language. That's an interesting thing to think about. I also wanted the extent to which that a lot of these, I can't remember the word you used, but these common sounds are sort of automatic ears.

Yeah, the bonus themes. Because like when you say like the SL sound, the slur sound, I can kind of imagine, like how Wittgenstein imagined language is created. just somebody pointing at something going to slap, you know. If I see something a bit sort of sly and slippery, I might sort of go like, slu, it's like, it's got this sort of, it's almost like I'm trying to mimic the sound or something. I mean, we're also too in the sauce as English speakers to separate ourselves. This might differ across cultures, right?

Some cultures, you know, have different sound combinations or different cultural traditions where they end up having different feelings about words. But the point is that we do have feelings about words. These feelings affect how we speak. We're going to use a word depending on what our vibe is about how much we like that word, how much we feel that word is appropriate to a situation. We'll get back to the show in just a moment. But first, another podcast episode, another day that I've forgotten to eat properly. Seriously, I've actually eaten basically nothing today and I now also don't have time to make a proper meal. But in situations like this, it's today's sponsor, Huell, who come to the rescue.

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unalive kind of variance of language where you can't say the word kill or it's at least suppressed, so we turn to these euphemisms to replace it. Also, in my book, I propose a broader definition for AlgoSpeak where it's also the way that trends and attention incentives shape language and the way that algorithms form in groups. All these words that are evolving through social media to me are a form of AlgoSpeak. So I don't know, at the time of recording, low cur cannually was a recently popular word. Six, seven was last fall and winter. But these terms were incubated and popularized because of this attention cycle where a word is initially trending and then influencers try to replicate trends to go viral themselves and then push

the word more to the mainstream. Vib-wise, I think there's another thing that we have this feeling about what other people are saying and doing and we are social creatures. We mimic. That is human nature. And so algorithms give us a certain feeling about what's going on. Like let's say the word vibe. Suddenly, in the last five years, we've been using the word vibe way more. We start talking about vibe check, vibe shift, vibe coding, all these new frames. phrases enter, does Google transfer, the word vibe are going way up, just because we feel like other people are saying the word vibe, and then we start saying the word vibe more. And that's part of this ambient feeling we always have. Literally your vibe about words affected how much people

say the word vibe, because you say a word more when you feel like people are saying a word more. Yeah. And there's an extent to which, I mean, this has got a lot to do with like censorship, right, and algorithmic censorship. But this isn't something new. Like, I learned from your about the word deceased, I think. Didn't the word deceased originate...

Latin Desques, which was a euphemism for the previous Latin word for death, Morse. Because deceased means something like

departed. Like departed, I think. Yeah. Yeah, so you've kind of got this euphemistic language stretching back to the beginning

of time. I mean, the obvious cases of non-internet versions of this are things like blasphemy, where people say, oh, geez,

or Jimini cricket, I had a Christian friend who recently had to stop saying crikey because he found out that it originated from the phrase Christ kill me. So he was like, damn, I can't say it anymore. I mean, I guess if that's where you're drawing the line, I think we're seeing a lot less of the religious euphemisms than in the past. And it kind of points to where society is shifting. It's hard to imagine like new religious euphemisms emerging. But some like some of the biggest bad words in the past were just like Christ and hell and damn.

And even like things related to obscenity, like fuck or shit, you know, are not that bad anymore. I feel like they're getting more normalized. I think the new form of euphemism is just whatever can't be articulated through the algorithm. The algorithm is feared more than God at this point. Yeah, that's a good way of putting it. And interestingly, because most communication is done online through text, so much of the slang is now not so much about the word, but about like either emoji usage or just spelling. Again, the classic versions of this of replacing an explicit word with like symbols, like the dollar sign for an S or something.

But it's gotten so much more explicit, like just people using fruit emojis to refer to like sex or things of that kind. or like the skull emoji to mean like laughing. It's like the equivalent of lull these days. And it's literally like it's imagistic. It kind of feels like we've devolved a bit. It's like we've gone back to this sort of hieroglyphic. We started with pictographs and now we're back. No, I bet we've always been doing the, for example,

the symbolic substitutions are called grollics as they were used in newspaper cartoons as far back as 1901. That's not new. I'm not, I don't think any of the fundamental underlying things are new. I do think algorithms are amplifying a lot of these linguistic trends we're observing. So what is new? Well, I mean, the presence of AI, the presence of algorithms

are slowly shifting our language. I think when I mentioned that vibe about how we use words, we use words when we feel like other people are using words. An example of AI changing our language is the word delve. So we know that chat GPT uses the word delve way more than humans do because there is a problem in the reinforcement learning process. And now we have a lot of evidence that humans are also starting to say delve at higher rates because we see it being used by chat

GPT. And even if you're not in chat GPT, your friends are going to start saying you more from chaty pt and then you're going to get it from your friends. So we're all being kind of linguistically infected with this idea of using delve more. And it spreads both through AI and through algorithms. And in the same way that I was getting at, algorithms have certain biases in the words they represent. These words become more culturally available. And then we start saying them more. And these trends move a lot faster because they've literally represented. the networks along which ideas diffuse. But then I wonder if it's kind of the same stuff that we've been doing for a long time.

Like, you know, we've been symbolically replacing language since 1901, and this is just kind of the new stage and a continuation of an inevitable linguistic story, then why the book, why this, why not just a book about the history of language? Why Algo speak? Why about today? And I don't just mean because, you know, the publishers probably said that would be a good idea and make it into a hit. No, I mean, it was always my idea.

I think it's so important to be stud. And the reason I focus so much of my social media content on modern slang, modern trends is I think it is our duty to be incredibly aware of what's going on in this exact moment. The exact moment has fundamentally changed from where it was six years ago. The presence of these AI and algorithms are changing how we communicate and how we think. And, yeah, while a lot of the trends are the same in the past, we've never had language so optimized around attention metrics.

We've never had so many ways of measuring and commodifying humanity and representing that through our words. Each word is now a piece of metadata that reflexively points back to who we are as individuals, which I find kind of really unsettling. I think we should be paying attention to, if we do look at these words, we start learning a lot more about what the social media platforms are doing to us. And that's what I always like about etymology. Etymology means the study of truth in Greek, etymus is truth. And if we look at where a word comes from, we can understand more about the underlying reality. Interesting.

I didn't know that about the etymology of etymology. Isn't it true that we don't know where the word slang comes from? I've always found that to be a bit of an irony. I mean, it makes a lot of sense, I guess. It's related to that sl stuff. Slang is something you sling around. It's kind of, it's loose, right? It's not a rigid thing.

So it's a slippery concept in and of itself. It definitely seems like it's related to some English or Irish. dialect or something like that, I think. Sure. But. So I wanted to ask about this, like, attention stuff. You wrote a piece on your substack, I think it was, about how it's called something like you're literally worshipping your phone.

You just talked about how, you know, people fear the algorithm more than they fear God. And I think that's a, that's an indictment of our culture. But here's another religious term, worship. What did you mean when you were coming up with that title? I think there are these micro-rechevile. religious aspects we kind of take in our lives that are increasingly, as we are kind of replacing God itself with whatever is going on in modern society, we're finding replacements for God. One of those ways is through social media. When you scroll, you are kind of hoping for a good video.

You're hoping for a dopamine hit. You're hoping for a reward for this action you are taking. Your attention is kind of like an offering and you get something back to it. So that's like one example of a microreligious action. I think I've been thinking a lot about like ritual, for example. A ritual being just a segment of time that we feel is extra special. I think generally I feel more extra special in my real life when I interact with people in these beautiful effervescent occasions. But also any bounded period of time is kind of a ritual.

Anything we segment off and say, this is a period of time. And so you enter sort of a ritual when you get onto social media. The rituals are always distinguished by like a marker starting the ritual and this period of liminality and then another marker ending the ritual. So clock strikes noon on inauguration day. An oath of office is taken. And then, you know, you're now the president of the United States. Or the pomp and circumstance starts playing.

And then graduates, you know, walk across the aisle. And then I now confer these degrees upon you. There's always some kind of marker. And then something happens. and then another marker. And so you open TikTok, for example, you see this kind of loading screen that is a marker you were entering

a different phase of existence. It is a kind of a comforting glow. And then you're in this kind of just timeless stage. It's kind of, you're hoping something will be different, you know? And by closing the app, you end that stage your life. So it is a segmented portion of reality in which we perceive some kind of signs and symbols I think it is at least helpful to look at it through a religious framework.

I want to look at it through a lot of different frameworks. I think the best way to approach your feeling about what's going on in social media to build up this phenomenology of what's going on is to attack it from many, many different angles and get a sense of the overall picture. So I don't want to use that as just one frame. It's reductive by itself. But I think there is this feeling first that you are God, right? Because you have control, you feel like you have control over your videos.

You get to choose what to like. you get to choose when to scroll. But then at the same time, it's like matrioshka doll. The algorithm is the god. It has control over you. You want to worship it. And I also see this with like AI,

this sort of like Mizana abeem about how we, God created us in his image. Now we're creating AI in our image. And it always loops kind of backwards that we use these human brain terms to describe AI, like memory and neural networks and all those terms. and then that starts affecting how we think about ourselves, that we come up with psychology ideas like cognitive processing theory

because of computer processing. And then it affects how we think about God. And so there's this kind of line between God and man and machine. And there's a really good book on that by Megino Giblin called God Human Animal Machine, which I highly recommend. But I'm kind of interested in applying, yeah, those ideas. If we are replacing God, we're searching for meaning. it comes out of these mundane things.

Yeah, and that seems to be like a, I kind of feel like each platform has its own language, its own subtleties, its own culture. Like I can sit for ages scrolling on like Instagram reels and I'll be like, right, I'm sick of that. And then I could like move over to TikTok and kind of feel like I'm going to get something different. I feel like I'm going to do something else.

There's going to be different culture. There's going to be like different people. It's like it's hard to explain, but it sort of feels like I'm moving from one city into another or something. Absolutely. I mean, these tech companies, you've got to start there. They have different priorities in what they're rewarding. They have different business incentives for what kind of content.

Their algorithms are all secrets, so they're designed to reward different things. And there will be a different kind of content recommended. I completely 100% agree that the feeling of being on Instagram is different than the feeling of being in TikTok. I noticed more like racist slop on Instagram, but I notice more like, you know, direct to shop links on TikTok or something like that. Those are just two examples. There's so many small cultural variations

and what kind of content gets recommended. For some reason, my videos always do better on Instagram and I've no idea why. Are you ever like ahead of the curve on this? Like do you start to see people say things in comment and you start to, and if you could like bet on the stock market,

you could be like, I think that's the next big thing. Do you know where we're at right now? There are things that are sort of cropping up that we should be on the lookout for. Yeah, I think one of my rare privileges as an etymologist who does public work as opposed to somebody in academia is that I do have access to these words. People will tag me in videos when new words start trending. A few weeks back, I conducted a public poll of what words do you think are popular right now.

And so at the time of right now, I see the word Chud and Ford and Femmcel coming from the in-cell communities, maybe LARP, which stands for live action roleplay, but people are using it in different contexts like I'm uh... LARPing being on a podcast. I don't know, something. Um, and then,

um, there are also like new words coming from African American English all the time. Uh, at least last fall, I don't know whether it's still trending the word folk as in like a synonym of bro. Like, what's up folk? Um,

yeah. I think it has potential to, to get, uh, bigger. Um, there's words coming from Twitter. I see the word egragor getting more popular.

This, uh, idea of the collective, um, awareness of our unconscious, which is kind of interesting. The word whimsy is, I mean, it was already a word, right? But it's getting way more popular right now. People are talking about whimsy and jester maxing. I see this is like a reaction to AI, perhaps, or just a desire for more of these in-person meaningful moments. But we're seeking out more whimsy in our lives for sure. So little

things like that, it's really fun to pay attention to. Sometimes these words are just like, borrowed from, it's not anything new. It's not like a new developed slang term or something. It's just an old word that people stopped using that got sort of rediscovered. Like lore or function. I think there's a lot of this genre of Gen Z rediscovering a word that was already a word, but then they start using it in their own kind of tongue-in-cheek way. Yeah, and I've seen some people try to brute force it.

It went semi-viral that there used to be a phrase. It might have been like Victorian England or something where people used to say they've got the morbs as in morbid. If they're feeling a bit like, you know, melancholy and depressed and Iolic, they've got the morbs. And everyone was like, this is really cool. And I really thought that that was going to take off. But unfortunately, unfortunately not. What was this word for the collective consciousness thing? You said aggregate.

Agrigore. A lot more people are talking about egragores, which is, yeah, this idea that we're collectively aware of each other's thinking. and that this thinking is building towards something. It's related to the idea of the newest fear, which is this zone of human cognition and thought and where it's building toward. And Egregor is sort of the product of that. I think I'm explaining that correctly.

But it's, yeah, I think we're more aware of each other. And that's so interesting that the, there's always discourse about the discourse about the discourse. There's always the people who are commenting on the words, and I'm saying this kind of, it's kind of interesting for me to say this, but the people commenting on the words are often influencing the direction

that these words take. I see a lot of like meme words, for example, be popularized through accounts like Hoopify, which are purporting to explain slang to you, but they're playing a part in the meme community and they are pushing these words themselves. And since every creator has a vested

interest in using trending words, we are helping build toward those words. It's interesting that you mentioned like predicting or almost putting money on new words because people are doing that. There are these cryptocurrency cabals, which are creating meme coins directly tied to new slang. So if like the word chud is getting popular, there's definitely a chud coin that rises in value as the word chud gets more popular because it represents a fractional share of your attention.

I'm almost positive that prediction markets are going to get into business of like predicting new words as well. I'm staying out of it because I'm trying to remain objective. But, and also I think Maybe these things are bad that we're commodifying everything. But it's definitely... If we've started commodifying the etymological development of language, I think we've maybe taken it a bit far. You always think it's gone too far. It's definitely happening and it will definitely happen more.

And I only see it happening more. And which is what's very interesting is that now there are actors with vested financial interests in helping words get more popular. So if you invest in Chudcoin and you make a bunch of Chud memes, you profit because the value of the coin goes up because more people are drawn toward your pump and dump crypto scheme. Same with if we do prediction markets. We're already seeing a lot of like these insider trading scandals.

We know right after, right before the Maduro capture, there was a Maduro whale who bet a bunch of money on Polymarket that Maduro would get captured. We know that somebody on Polymarket edited the battle lines of somebody in the Institute for the study of war edited the battle lines for Ukraine versus Russia to cash out on a polymarket deal. There's suspicious stuff with Caroline Levitt ending her press conferences right before the cutoff for like the 98% certainty, stuff like that. I think we're definitely going to see this role of prediction markets, this role of mean coins, this role of influencers commenting on things. All these people are kind of doing the same thing.

They're building toward the egregore. This collective awareness of the trend as the trend occurs. And that puts us in a weird place where the map starts to proceed the territory. Like we are at this, our ideas about what's going to happen kind of end up manifesting what happens. Yeah. What's the most, what's the most short-lived internet slang that you can think of that you remember that everyone's just kind of forgotten about? Um, short-lived. I mean, Chugi had like a moment for a week on TikTok and then it just immediately went past A. I think Perhaps because there was a New York Times article about it, which kind of killed the vibe immediately.

But also when words stick out too much, when they don't seem like they work. I wrote in my book an example of the chair emoji, which was used for like two days as an example of like a laughing emoji. And there was a similar phenomenon with like a gondola emoji last year where people try to force these substitutions. And if it's a big enough creator, they can kind of make it happen for like a very brief flash in the pan moment. but the thing about that is when a trend feels too forced, we very rarely adopt it, which is probably another reason the Morbs thing didn't work out. Yeah, like, you know, if it feels a bit forced,

like, yeah, that was that, that was a KSI thing, the chair thing. I remember you writing about it, and I have a feeling it was. It was meant to troll KSI. Yeah, well, basically people just decided in it. But then it kind of took the internet. Yeah. Of just like, wouldn't it be funny if we all just like started commenting a chair and he couldn't figure out why.

And then it sort of became this thing for like two seconds. And yet within communities, there are probably, there are probably slang terms anyway. Like I'm not sure, I'm not aware of any slang terms that exist in my sort of ecosystem. But surely if I tried hard enough, I could probably come up with a series of like slang words

that would only make sense to somebody who watches this channel referring to like myriological nihilism and, No, I mean, well, that's kind of, especially on YouTube, you get a culture built around the creator more than on the other platforms. If we're talking about how the feeling of a platform is different on, you know, my YouTube comment section is always blowing up with memes relevant to previous videos I've made. And it kind of exists on TikTok a little bit, but it's way more of a community-centered thing on YouTube, which kind of affects your experience of scrolling through the medium. do you think we'll, I sort of hinted at this earlier, do you think we'll get to a global language? There'll be a point in say, like, maybe not even that long now, maybe like a few hundred years or something where anywhere you go in the world, you will at least be able to communicate with people, even if they've retained some, you know, vestiges of whatever. If you go anywhere in the world and say, okay, they'll understand you. If you say, lull, they'll probably understand you, you, you know, that kind of stuff.

But do you think we're going to sort of move towards a, what, what's that, that, is that one language? they try to do it, right? They try to come with the global language. I think major countries and identity groups will continue to have their own languages indefinitely because it's a part of their identity. I do think, I mean, right now 50% of the internet is in English. English is the lingua franca, the French language of the internet. And people... Is that what lingua franca means?

Yeah. Because that used to be the uniting language and diplomatic discourse. I've never noticed that before. That's so funny. Now it's English. anguish is the French language. But yeah, people will revert to the English language when they're speaking on the internet between different nationalities.

And it's insane how much these trends travel. I was talking to a friend whose brother in a remote Chinese village, somehow the kids there knew about 6'7. And I've seen similar videos like that of like this random Philippine island, you know, knows, you know. But actually, Philippines are very tapped into American culture. So that's not that surprising. I would say like Japan, Korea, and the Philippines are like half of their like language right now is just English slang words or the other mixing in.

So Tagalog is now like not spoken nearly as much as just like taglish, this like fusion between Tagalog and then the Tagalog gay slang and then just English all intramingled. You'll hear if you listen to Japanese or Korean so many English words all the time. China kind of has its own thing going on because of their social media ecosystem is more isolated. but they they kind of it's so funny how much they replicate English language kind of stuff the same thing that's going on here they have their own like gaming slang that bleeds into Chinese language they have their own memes and trends in the same way because these these mediums are doing the same thing even if it's siloed in a different country yeah um did I do we know if these slang words like um sort of get translated like if the six seven thing is like popular everywhere do you get

French kids going like whatever it would be C C, CET, or whatever it is. Or are they like the American way of saying it that goes viral? Sometimes it gets calced and sometimes it gets loan-worded. And a calque is when it it's sort of translated into the equivalent expression and alone is when you just

take it as 6-7. I think, for example, like 6-7, most people just took it like that. I use in my book, like, the example of Desvivir and Unalive in Spanish. They don't say on a live. They kind of create an analogy of Despevier. So sometimes it turns into either one. Yeah.

How familiar are you with UK slang? I'm sure you could educate me. It's interesting. Every time I speak to Americans, I can't think of really any American slang that Brits don't know about, but there's so much British slang that Americans don't know anything about. And it's also really difficult to explain. There's a lot of Jamaican influence in UK slang.

So, for example, the phrase waguayn is really popular here, sort of coming from like what's going on in a Jamaican accent and sort of say waguan, which I don't think Americans really do. It's a shame because that's quite a good one. It's fun to say. No, it's like your equivalent of African American English. Like you always borrow from these socially prestigious yet kind of culturally marginalized communities. That's a very normal thing.

Yeah, exactly. And that's sort of going on. I don't know about the origins of a lot of the other ones, but like, you know, we'll say things like, there's this, the most confusing one to me that I can never explain is the word still. Like, in the UK, people just say the word still, but they say it sort of almost arbitrarily. You'll be like, you'll be like, how are you doing today, man? You'd be like, I'm good, still. And then you say, oh, cool, like, whereabouts are you from? like from London still. It's sort of, it's almost like a bit of punctuation. It's like a discourse smirker or something. I'll have to look into that. Maybe I'll make some videos on British language. You've given me kind of an idea here.

But yeah, some of it's more obvious. Like the term, you know, if you get stabbed, somebody might say that you got chefed up, which I've always thought is quite, it's quite charming.

We say, um, as a greeting, we often say like, what you're saying, like, what are you saying? Instead of like,

it's sort of like, how's it going or whatever. You're not literally. asking the question, you say, like, what you're saying? And so if you're texting a British person, you might get like W-Y-S as a greeting, what you're saying? Or it can also be a question. It can also mean like, you're supposed to be meeting someone in an hour and you text them like, what you're saying? Like, you know, what are we going to do? Oh, that's so interesting. I mean, the weird. The ones I've looked into always come from like multicultural London English or something.

Yeah, it's bound to be. It's bound to be. But I don't. And also, it's associated with the roadman, which is like England's equivalent of the gangster. And it's sort of, it's got this, this slightly sort of, you know, if you're like on the road, slinging dope and wearing a, wearing a puffer jacket, then you're more likely to be the person using it. Yeah, I've gotten like Roadman TikToks on my for you page. Yeah, see, I thought you'd be all over that. Like, Roadman slang is like its own world.

And it's so, it's so beautiful. It's, it's poetic. And it takes a long time to master it. But also it means that if you then listen to UK rap music, it all begins. to make sense because I think because actually interestingly UK rap just like doesn't really make it in America even if it's like super catchy or whatever because rap is so much about the language it's so much about the pun and it speaks to the culture that you're in what resonates with your community yeah you just sort of can it literally just like doesn't translate it's like listening to french music which you can

do but if it's rap you're unlikely to really enjoy it that much because it's so integral that you get the meaning. But for some reason, you know, America just always manages to make its way to this aisle. But yeah, I'd recommend it. A video on Roadman. I'm going to look into that. Yeah, yeah. Wow. So I'd also just love to see your like raw reaction to some of these words and like where they, where they come from and stuff. It's, uh, it's some of them, you know, some of them more sensible like the word loud kind of meaning, kind of meaning good, you know, something can just, you just sort of say loud, which loud does have this like intensifier effect, you know, do do americans say dead to mean something's not very good you'd be like oh that's a that's a dead song

oh you could say like the party's dead um like there's nothing happening but you wouldn't say it's a dead song um i'd say like the slang use of dead is like i'm dead for like that's that's that's funny um no like in the way you would say this party's dead that's just been like universalized in the uk you know that's a that's a i could see that like taken off if that you know if given the right because it just you need an application you need it like it makes sense the song is dead like that makes sense um or bear which weirdly i think a lot of slang comes from like inverting right so like the way that something if something's bad it means it's good if something's sick it means that it's great you know if a if a if a drum and bass like bass line is nasty

it's a good thing in the UK we sometimes say uh bear like B-A-R-E to mean lots or very which is kind of counterintuitive like we'll be like you know that that that was bare expensive or it's it's bare loud in there um to mean like to mean like very and i'm not sure like that now i'm thinking about it that does seem to be an example of like it meaning the opposite but is that like a yeah is that a common thing UK in particular has such a long history of inversion but yeah exactly these examples like um oh that's fire versus oh that's you're cool or like you know like sick stuff like that it is always kind of

comes out of minority communities who are trying to subvert the expectations of the majority language so I guess like it doesn't even have to be like a marginalized community like look at surfer slang like you have like stuff like gnarly and wicked from like Californian surfers in the 80s

but they're just trying to like show that they're different than the rest of America and so they it sounds counterciful cultural to say things that don't seem right, you know. And then eventually it does end up seeming right. And then we find new ways for a language to reroute. Yeah.

It's like, I wonder if it's a kind of almost a reclaiming, you know, like a lot of the time, like slurs are quite intentionally reclaimed. But also just like sort of attitudes, if you're a member of a community that is either like marginalized or just kind of looked upon with suspicion or annoyance like you know like chavs i don't know if you've got an equivalent of chavs in the u.s but kind of like you know delinquent kids you know running around on the streets and stuff are often described as rude like they're they're rude little kids and again in the UK like if someone plays a really really like cool song you might be like that's rude that's rude okay yeah it can and again it can kind of come out of way and I wonder

how much of this is a kind of like more subtle yeah no it is I mean the most important thing to understand about language is a form of power it is a form of building your identity who gets to use which words structures are ideas about society and each other and so when the reason african-american english comes up with so many new slang words and i'm using slang and quotation marks that filter into mainstream English is because they have a need to differentiate their identity from English, which has straight white norms about what words should be. The people writing the dictionaries and the academics are like historically all these old white men.

And so this is like a different group, especially like the ballroom scene, which is like a gay black scene in New York City in 1980s, seems to be the source of like half of Gen Z slang. The reason is because they were trying to differentiate themselves and build something that was separate from how society was supposed to be defining them. And so that's a big thing. The language is always this tool of identity and differentiating yourself. And the same way we open the conversation by talking about middle schoolers and how they are

always timelessly finding ways to differentiate their identity. The reason we come up with new words and adopt new words is it says something about who we are. To use a word is kind of identifying with it. It's saying I am a speaker who is okay with using this different word. Or, no, no, I have my ideas about what the English language is. I'm not going to use this new word. And so it becomes a cultural marker. Yeah.

Do you have, zooming out a bit here, do you have a view on like the origin of language? The reason I ask is because as an etymologist, I feel that that's either the kind of question which is like foundational to your studies or like one that you see is completely outside of it. And I'm not sure where it. It's such an interesting question. And first I'll say I have no idea. And I think any linguist who tells you they have an idea is lying to you. And there's a bunch of different like origins,

like hypotheses that it might be from singing or it might be from mimicking the calls of animals. I mean, it's just no documented evidence of anything and we can only ever speculate unless you give me a time machine. Personally, I do believe that, language is at least started when we started

abstracting things from the present moment so if you point at something that's still not language to me because you're pointing at something real right now the second that point maybe language could have been gestural before it was spoken as well I don't know but if you somehow

a sign becomes about something that didn't happen here the second we're like recording buffalo on a cave wall and the buffalo is no longer in front of you that's when we're in this abstract mode where we're thinking about this symbol as something that refers to something else.

So whatever origin it is, I think it's at the same time as we start treating it as this abstract thing because otherwise it's just communication and not language. Do you think it's appropriate to cool what LLMs are doing like chat chepti language,

or should it be better thought of as a mimic of language? I think simulation of language is way more correct. And I think one of the biggest mistakes you can make when talking to chat, GPT, is thinking that it's speaking English to you and you're speaking English back to it. We know that there's these misrepresentations

like the word delve. And even if you're avoiding the word delve, there's crucial meticulous, commendable, potential, all these like words that are slightly overrepresented because they recorded the language incorrectly. There's this idea, tracing back all the way to Wittgenstein, but popularized through John Firth, that language is contextual and that we can understand language by understanding the context of what's going on.

So these LLMs are storing words in proximity to other words and kind of making this complicated map of what language should be. But your mental way that you store words is dependent on what your vibe of the language is and everybody will have a different idea of it. And what you'd end up getting is this like homogenized, weird, inaccurate map because sometimes it'll draw from if the input is wrong or if the training process is wrong, some words are going to show up at way different rates. And so it's not speaking language. It's speaking this statistically inaccurate misrepresentation of language. And well, speaking is also anthropomorphizing it, which I don't really agree with. It's, you know, it's predicting new output.

And also, it is programmed to mirror your behavior back to you. It is programmed to use first person pronouns. All these things sort of create this illusion that tricks you into thinking, oh, I'm speaking, I'm having a normal conversation. Even look at the user interface. Look at how chat GPT is structured like I message. this text bubble interface that we've been trained for decades to think that we're talking with a real human when we see this interface. Now we see this AI. And so everything trains our brains into

thinking this is real language, even though it's this like pseudo language. But because our sort of immune system is lowered, our guard is lowered. We are less suspicious of this as AI language. We are more likely to adopt these overrepresented words and phrases too. Like it's not just X, it's Y or a lot of kind of collocations like that. Yeah, it's a shame. I was a big user of the M-Dash long before. I'm still using it. They can take that away from me when I'm dead.

But I think there's ways humans can use it that's like, Chachy-B-T has a way of using it in the negative parallelisms or something. If you use it creatively and beautifully, I think we still have a chance of reclaiming the M-Dash. Yeah, I use it in text as well, which I've been told before is a little bit odd. That is a little odd. just like, I want to do that. Not an end dash, but like, as in I use a dash, and it's supposed to be end dash, but it's

actually just a little dash, but it's, it's like saying something. Because you know, people when they text, they text oftentimes in like multiple texts. It's like a, it's like a form of phrasing. Like, you're going to text your friend in your sort of good. Ending the text, sending the text is the form of punctuation. That's also why it's weird to use a period in a text message because the act of sending it already shows it signals that you've completed a thought. And so actually it makes a lot of sense to, it's a form of paraccommunication that you're sending multiple messages.

And I think if you add punctuation like periods or m-dashs, no offense. I think you're less literate in the format of how texting operates. Yeah, well, I think I'd never thought about hitting send as a form of punctuation, but that makes so much sense. Which is also why, like, if you put a period or a full stop, as we call it, it's one of the few, occasions where the British version is more just like on the nose and obvious than the American, you know, the full stop. It seems a bit passive aggressive, right, even though it's like a natural way to end a sentence. For me, the dash is a sort of like, I don't know, I get, also when I'm actually just writing, I have this particular formula I always follow. It's,

it's always like an intro phrase, then a colon, then another phrase, then a dash, then another phrase. I don't know why I keep using that kind of thing. And I guess I'm replicating that in texts. It's like the way I talk, when I talk on videos, I'll sort of say something, and then I'll say this, and then I'll say that, but this, but that. And I'm sort of going a bit back and forth kind of thing, and I do that with, I do that with dashes. So maybe I'm coming across as a bit passive-aggressive, but people have told me it's a little bit odd to text. It is a little odd. Yeah. No, but you do you. That's great. I mean, everybody should just communicate the way they feel like it. Again, language is a tool of identity and you feel like the M-Dash or N-Dash speaks to your identity, go ahead and use it.

But if your identity changes to, yeah, if your identity is more like I want to seem like, so personally when I text, I'm one of those annoying Gen Z people that will do everything lowercase. But it's because most of the friends I'm texting, their expectation of texting is that you should be speaking lowercase. And there's kind of a beauty to that that now when you make something uppercase, it has more expressive power. instead of this just being the default, it serves as this extra linguistic cue.

And we need as many linguistics as we can get without things like body language. So texting takes on it. There's a really good book called Because Intronaut by Gretchenit by Gretchen-McCaac that people should get on this for more explanation. But yeah, my identity is that I want to make other people as comfortable as possible in each medium. So when I am using email, maybe I'll speak more formally. but when I'm using text, I'm going to switch into what I think other people's idea of text is.

Yeah, that's interesting. It just makes it seem like I'm using chat GPT to respond to people's texts a lot of the time, which is a bit of a shame. I don't know, it'll just be like, it'll be like, I might be like, oh, watch the address again,

trying to work out travel. And I'll just put it as one message. I'll just put it on, I'll put a dash in between. You know, it's like a, it's like a, it's like a, I'm trying to save energy, save water, save electricity, you know, all of that kind of good stuff. I think it's admirable.

Yeah, I think the thing with AI is that it speaks predictably. And if you want to be different, just speak unpredictably and use things and vary your rhythm and change your kind of phrases you use and make it a musical jazz-like thing instead of this formulaic thing. Yeah, language is a bit of a dance. I sometimes compared it to like a chess game in that most conversations start in a very limited sort of manner of ways. It's very often a sort of like, how's it going? Yeah, good man, how are you? It's like, it's uncanny how. I remember when I was first

trying to learn how to play chess, I'm still not very good. And I thought that I'd have to memorize all of these different like roots and lines and stuff. And it turns out that yeah, like you should, you should learn a few openings as they call them. Yeah. But once you're like five, six moves into a game, you're probably playing a game of Jeffs that like no one in the history of mankind he'd ever played before, so there are no rules. And I think language is kind of the same. There's also a conversational end game.

There's like a usual way we end conversations. Yeah, right. Well, I got this thing coming up. Yeah, all right, I'll be seeing you. Have a good one. You know, there's a, yeah, we perceive there to be certain rules in language that we don't communicate to each other. When you're opening something, like a greeting is normal.

and then you have to start with some degree of small talk, and then you can get into deeper stuff. I think it's not really possibly go straight into the deep thing because people would perceive it as like this socially strange thing to go up to someone and say, what's your sense of self? You got to really kind of work your way into that one. And also there's an abruptness if you suddenly cut off.

So like it's normal and I find these social niceties to be beautiful. I think a lot of people who don't like small talk. It's a way of ritual. It's a way of bond. Well, yeah. You know, there's two models of what language is. One is transmission of information per second, so like how many bytes of data are you communicating? And that's the kind that the algorithms like.

That's the kind that AI is trained to understand. And the second model of communication is a ritual understanding of language, that this is a bonding act between two human beings. And that you are treating this as like a special, meaningful exchange where it is less about the exact amount of communication and more about just the moment you're in. I really like that. And small talk to me is kind of beautiful because it is definitionally ritualistic. If you're just trying to communicate bits of information, you're not going to do it. Yeah, I was thinking about ritual and how you said earlier you've got like a marker, then the thing, then a marker. That's exactly what a conversation is. Yeah. Conversations do. But why do you think it is that people like euphemize even just like,

even when everybody knows what's what's being being done here like if I sort of if we were hanging out and I sort of went like you know right or I sort of like hit my legs and I'm sort of or I'm like oh I think um fantastic yeah it's like are you got are you thinking of having are you going to have a dessert it's like a dessert menu and like do you think do you think you'll have a dessert no should we just get the bill yeah okay like why can't we just like everyone knows what's going on why can't we just finish this conversation and then I just sort of go that's the end of the podcast and then just hang up. Maybe we should do that today and today alone. Why do we need it? Why do we need this punctuation? Exactly because it is a bonding signal between humans. Well, you know, also you don't know different people because at this point, once we've built up the ritual, it's very hard to get rid of it. You don't know who cares about the ritual and who doesn't care about the ritual.

Because you should think of conversations kind of like game theory, right? If person one wants to not do small talk, but doesn't know what person two wants, and you're not going to communicate this in advance, and person two doesn't want to do small talk, but doesn't know what person one wants, the national equilibrium is actually they both do the small talk because they are operating on a limited understanding

of what the other person is expecting. If we had perfect knowledge, yeah, we would just skip the small talk, but we never have perfect knowledge about another human being. It's always, well, this is the social norm. I think you'll be normal to do the social norm, and I want to make the other person as comfortable as possible, so I'm going to engage in that norm. And then, you know, once we've exchanged our niceties,

then I can get into the deeper stuff. Yeah, it might be like a form of, it might be like a safety net as well, in that maybe you're at a party and you want to talk to people about your deepest desires and philosophical outlook, But if you go and do that and then it turns out that the person is like, you know, dangerous or like some kind of psycho or something like that and you regret doing it, you can kind of test the waters a bit, you know, just by saying, how's your day going? And you can just sort of start to get a feel as to whether you essentially trust someone enough to have the real conversation.

It's like vetting someone before you open the door to your home. It is a game. It is, from an evolutionary standpoint, it's thought to be that it's kind of a way to weed out who is a normal member of society. and so you engage in the small talk and you also pick up a lot of things immediately you pick up class signals you pick up social in-group signals you figure out whether somebody is

regardless of whether they're normal or not whether they're one of your group and if they're not like you you know you don't have to commit to the conversation yeah I saw someone say about TV shows and films

how for some reason whenever they they depict phone calls. They never have people hang up normally. Like if you're on a phone call, you'd be like... You don't do the, all right, well, see you later, goodbye. You know, yeah, you just... Yeah, that kind of thing. They just like finish their sentence and then just hang up.

And once... I can't remember where I saw it somewhere online, but since then, every time I'm watching a phone on a TV show, it's like, it's so conspicuous. I don't know what's going on there. It's something to do with the way that they're scripting dialogue, but people will just literally finish the message and hang up the phone. It's so, so strange. People never talk normally in TV.

I mean, we use all these like back channel. I just said the word, oh, I used the filler word, right? We, we, we, not, you're nodding right now. I don't know, there's, like, you might say things. You might say the word right when someone's saying or like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Just things like cues to the other person that we're still talking and that you're paying attention. But that kind of stuff doesn't work well in like conversational dialogue and TV a lot. So they'll just skip it.

And part of that might be because, I mean, like, well, I said part of that might be because of There's probably not because it's too long, but I think you also have to remember that those filler words and those indicators change over time. So, like, I have to remind myself, particularly when I'm reading the Bible, constantly, you've got Jesus saying things like, he'll be like, verily I say unto you and stuff like that. And it sounds really sort of dramatic and crazy and weird, but it's probably just the ancient equivalent of him being like, right. You know? Right. Listen up, guys. Listen up, listen up, kind of thing.

And it sounds very dramatic, but there is a difference. Like if you, if you were like, oh, I'm going to go and, you know, go and watch this show or eat this, go to this restaurant or something. And I say, like, oh, don't do that. You know, it's not very nice. Versus going like, listen, trust me, listen to the words I'm saying, do not do that kind of thing. It's just like an emphasis thing. And those things are important in human communication. and I guess they're somewhat missing in our media.

But they're not, it's because language is very intuitive and very natural. And so that's very difficult to fake. You'll find this interesting. There's a lot of controversy over the first word of Beowulf, which is Quat. And so many scholars have debated about what quat means. But you've got to understand that Beowulf is like a barred retelling a story in a tavern. And he's basically saying, yo, guys, listen up. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, like, there's a lot of the... that in particularly like older or ancient texts where it's just it's just not quite clear what is meant to be expressed here. The word Hevel from the book of Ecclesiastes is another one. You can sort of contextually pick it up, but, you know, is variously translated as meaningless or absurd or vanity when it really means something like wind. And I sometimes think you almost like, it's almost better not to translate it because the word is so clear and so context, and just the whole reason it's using the word over and over again is so that you can, it's sort of trying to give you a really long, convoluted definition.

And this problem of translation, I mean, is a, the problem of translation is like a huge underlying problem in linguistics that, you know, nobody can ever agree how to properly translate a text because you can kind of try to go word for word. But again, the vibe, the lens you have up, the frame you're putting on this language, is just different. And so people, sometimes the best translations are closer to vibe translation. translations where it's just like the feeling that this evokes in you rather than word by word Google translates style this is what this means. That's that's robotic language. That's transmission

of bits of information and the other ones that kind of just our feelings about words. So it's interesting that some of the like yeah one controversial translation of Bay Wolf just starts out with the word bro. But it might be closer to the vibe translation. translation. Yeah. Of course, like, the Bible is a great example of this because there have been so many translations and the reason is that language just keeps on changing. I mean, the King James version, which is maybe the most famous, is practically unreadable as like a theological text. Like, you'll probably roughly be able to follow along, but you'll just miss so much and it'll be so silly because it's it's meant to be readable it's meant like you're already doing this weird translation

of another language um and so why are we looking at this old thing because if the bible is meant to be understood accurately it should be understood like the present vibe so it's closer to the vibe of bay wolf to actually have it translated as bro um i think a really interesting example with like the catholic church is like priests cassox which were meant to be like relatable it was like the what the peasants were wearing so the priests were the cassocks and eventually the peasants started with wearing different things. And then the priest just kept wearing the cast socks. And now this symbol, it's kind of like, our clothing is basically language as well. That this symbol of like relatability becomes a symbol of like old fashionedness. And I think one of my biggest issues with like

churches and religions, they get stuck in these crystallized aesthetics of what like their interpretation is supposed to be rather than constantly reevaluating the ongoing moment because we only live in the present. We should keep thinking about the present as it exists. That's kind of why I really like tracking the slang words of now, tracking the trends that are happening now, because it's, as an atomologist, there's plenty of interesting things with history, and we can look at the history, but remember that it is history, and that it is only the current moment in which we live that we should really strive to understand and not get stuck in this past idea of what language should be. Getting ready for a game means being ready for anything, like packing a spare stick.

I like to be prepared. That's why I remember 988, Canada's suicide crisis helpline. It's good to know, just in case. Anyone can call or text for free confidential support from a train responder anytime. 98, suicide crisis helpline is funded by the government in Canada. Yeah, and I think people often forget that these particular traditions, as you say, like these crystallized aesthetics, are themselves just historical contingencies. I have a lot of debates for people, or not so much recently, but about the Latin mass. in Catholicism, you know, Latin was the French language, the lingua franca, of the Catholic

Church. And it was basically universal for the mass to be said in Latin. And then in the 1960s, the Catholic Church decided you're allowed to say mass in your own language. And it was actually extremely controversial because lots of traditionalists thought you're sort of breaking this chain of tradition and it's going to sort of dilute like through translations, like the message and stuff. And so even like now, wasn't the point of the Latin for people to understand it? Exactly. You know, it was originally, like the first Latin translation of the Bible is called the Vulgate, as in vulgar, as in like common language. The whole point was it was supposed to be this demystified, localized version. And so today you get a lot of Catholics who go to Latin masses.

You can find them like everywhere. Yeah. And it's traditionalists who are like, we want to be in keeping with the church. And I find it very strange. I've debated people on this. I had a debate with Michael Knowles about it once with. And I was like, look, I kind of would understand if you were insisting on saying the mass in Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke, or even Greek, the language of the New Testament. But Latin, it just because it so happens to be the language that came to dominate the Catholic Church, it just seems like such a historical contingency. So it now has the opposite effect. Yeah.

On one hand, to argue the other side, it's kind of cool how that forces you to focus more on the form of the language rather than the content. And now because you perceive the church as a special place, you perceive the mass as a special time. And you perceive this language as a special language. We begin to draw more meaning out of it and we get closer to that experience of whatever God is. so maybe it's better to focus on this crystallized aesthetic. But then the problem is you get stuck in only feeling special when you're in church or only feeling special when you're connecting with the God in the sanctioned ways. There was a really interesting rabbi who I went down recently about how you're supposed

to celebrate the Eucharist in sign language because that was a huge controversy when the first sign language Eucharist was like 1970s or something. But also you're supposed to like raise things while doing like you're also it's thought that the Christ is the word made flesh and the word has such a power in like enacting this trend you know this whole thing um but what happens when it's through sign through hand it can the same process be done through your hands and i mean the the church says yes but there's there's a lot of people who are upset about that yeah that that's interesting and i think these problems only come up when you're insisting on well crystallizing your your your

approach, which is what the Catholics have always been extremely good at doing, I think. But yeah, the Latin thing in particular is, I think, a perfect example of what you're talking about. And also, I understand, yeah, there is this argument that, like, if you don't understand it, it makes it feel a bit more sort of mystical and reverend. And, like, fair enough, but then it's a, you might as well do the whole thing in silence and let the priest just do it in his head. In fact, you know the words, the words, focus, focus. There's the feeling of being with other people as this thing is done, the collective effervescence, right? I think another thing that we've lost

with the increasing transmission view of language that's getting popular since the telegraph, since we can rapidly communicate information, that we've moved more towards the bits per second model of communication and we've lost with the ritual of communication. One thing that we've really lost is our sense of language as a spiritual or magical thing. If you look at any of the oldest languages,

ancient runes were thought to be magical, Oracle Bone script is literally called that because it was meant to prophesize the future, Hebrew being the sacred language of Judaism and Latin being the sacred language of Christianity and all of these languages had a special power to their speakers I think even as they were being spoken

they were considered more special and the more we reproduce something Walter Benjamin, work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction the more you make a copy of something the less special it feels to you and we've made so many copies of language and look at AI now

which is I think by the year like 2050 there's supposed to be more AI generated images than human-made images in the entirety of human existence, right? And we're having a similar thing with language. I don't know how to stat on that. But the thing is, we're having so much of this reproduction of language that it starts to feel like it's not as special. And I know I'm a rapid talker and I say a lot of things.

And maybe I could take a word of advice myself from this. But if we deliberate over our words more and we choose to regard them as these insanely powerful things that have the power to change the course of reality, that can change other people's minds. Then we start to understand it more in that magical term, even if it is in English. We should just really hang on each word

and think about the meaning behind each word. And that's another reason I like etymology. It's an act of presence. Yeah, me too. And you discover so many interesting things. I was just thinking about the Latin Mass there. I was going to tell you might already know this, but you know the phrase hocus pocus, as in magic.

Yeah, hawk et corpus, right? Yeah, something like that. Like, yeah, hock est, you're right, this is my body, I think. Yeah, Hock est enum corpus mium or meum. Okay. This is my body. And you get this sort of this parody of,

because transubstantiation, the turning of body, of the bread and wine into the body in blood of Jesus, is seen by outsiders as literally this kind of like ridiculous magic. And so you get the mocking the magic of the church with this hocus, pocus, this fake Latin. And it just embeds itself into our language. it's awesome.

I just think it's like the coolest thing in the world, how words just crop up like that. I think we should think about, I'm not coming at this as somebody who's religious or spiritual, but how God says let there be light. And he goes on to name it light. I think that's so powerful that the first thing that happens is the act of uttering.

And there's this idea in linguistics of the performative utterance and not performative in the performative male sense, but performative in the sense of enacting, kind of like how you perform gender. Performative utterance is something that physically changes reality that we agree it does, right? So like a minister pronouncing someone husband and wife

or kind of at the end of a ritual often, right? It's I now pronounce you graduates of the university. The pronouncement doesn't happen. It doesn't happen. So both you're saying something and you're physically changing reality. But I think on a smaller level, this is called an ill-acutionary utterance. Every statement we make also changes reality.

Your headspace and our listeners' headspaces are getting closer to my headspace as I articulate things, which is so powerful. We are literally changing reality with every single utterance, and why don't we feel the weight of that more? Why don't we ascribe more to the impact we're having? So I'll go speak, to take it from ancient, Latin, back to TikTok. Do you see this book as like, I mean, you're sort of diagnosing what's going on

online. Are you sort of identifying like a problem to be solved or is that like a mission statement or is this just kind of like, hey, isn't that interesting? There are problems for sure. I think the language stuff is interesting and I'm just diagnosing it on that level, on the linguistic level, right? I have two hats that I like to wear. One is the linguist hat and one is the cultural critic hat and I want to wear them in different context. So one is saying, look, this is what's going on with language. And the other is saying, okay, if this is going on with language, language is kind of a canary in the coal mine of what's happening in broader society. It is true. If we see a lot of our language coming from in-cell communities, that in-cells are broadly influencing culture.

And it's not just the words that they're influencing. People's political ideas are, we're normalizing this rhetoric through the Overton window, that range of acceptable discourse. I find that very concerning. I find it concerning how these tech platforms, have this gross mediating power over everything we can say and that they structure our discourse and our conversations and in tracking how these platforms are changing things in real time, I always see them align our speech with their business priorities. And then we have no choice as creators

who have to follow the monetization or the virality incentives of these platforms. We have no choice but to communicate in the way that they want us to communicate. And that is deeply disturbed. And these platforms have far too much power and they are clearly misusing their ability to mediate our conversations for their financial benefit in a way that extracts value from our attention and our presence online. So yeah, I think there's a lot of problems. From a linguistic angle, though, if I'm putting linguistic hat back on, no, there's a bunch

of cool stuff happening. Language is doing this cool thing that it's always been doing. So I guess you can look at both things at once. great that's the end at the end