ADRIAN MA, HOST:
One of the beautiful and sometimes bewildering things about the English language is that it's always changing. I mean, take the words rizz or skibidi or even the expression, to cancel. It was fairly recently that we started using cancel to mean withdrawing support or denouncing. And, of course, rizz meaning charisma, or skibidi meaning, well, nothing. Those words didn't even exist just a few years ago. Now they're used and understood by millions of people. Now, don't worry if you do not count yourselves among them, because our next guest argues that the way we speak on- and offline is evolving at an unprecedented pace. He's Adam Aleksic, who's a creator that posts online under the name Etymology Nerd. He's got a new book called "Algospeak," and he joins us from our bureau in New York. Adam, thanks for talking with WEEKEND EDITION.
ADAM ALEKSIC: Hi, Adrian. Excited to be here.
MA: So you say there are these inflection points in history that have had a huge effect on the way people communicate. There's the invention of writing and the printing press and the internet. Now you say we are living through another inflection point shaped by algorithms. Can you give us your argument in a nutshell?
ALEKSIC: Of course. We have all these algorithms shaping in-groups and echo chambers and where words come from, how words spread, how trends get popularized, how some words are censored, and we have to find ways around that. So one example I start the book with is the word unalive. The word kill is suppressed on TikTok, so many creators have turned to say unalive instead. And now we have kids in middle schools writing essays about Hamlet unaliving himself, and that's an example of social media algorithmic speak bleeding into the mainstream. And that's traditional algospeak. But in many ways, algorithms are now shaping every aspect of how we communicate. The underlying process is not new. We've always had fads, for example. But algorithms compound how trends get spread online in a way that makes slang words appear faster than in the past.
MA: Language has the potential to go viral in a way that it didn't before.
ALEKSIC: Look at the word rizz, which started out in 2022 in the back corners of the internet. Kai Cenat popularized it on Twitch. By the end of 2023, it became the Oxford English Dictionary Word of the Year. I think it might have taken a word like rizz maybe a decade to become popular in the past. But because of how algorithms amplify trends, they incentivize creators to use trending metadata because that's a way that creators tap into ongoing fads and stay relevant. Then these words get pushed further. And the word rizz entered what I call the engagement treadmill, where some words get pushed more because they are trending.
MA: But it's not all about trends spreading words. Sometimes these new words serve a genuinely useful function. Like, you talk about the example of the phrase, canceling somebody, which didn't exist that long ago and now everyone knows it. It kind of fills this semantic gap in our language. Can you talk about some other examples of these gap-filling words and how they spread through social media?
ALEKSIC: Right. An important thing to remember is that words are memes and they get tied to meme lifespans. If there's no natural reason to keep the meme around, it dies. One usual reason memes do die is because they get used by this out-group that no longer feels like it's funny or cool. If your grandmother starts saying skibidi, skibidi's going to die out. I'm a strong believer that in about a year, skibidi's going to be out.
MA: OK. You heard it here first.
ALEKSIC: (Laughter) But cancel's going to stay around because that's a useful term for this new internet concept that we have. Same with, like, ghosting or selfie, these words that emerge. Let's say selfie emerged around the same time as yeet and on fleek, and yet we don't use those words anymore because they were tied to this obtrusive meme that sticks out. It was perceived as a meme. However, selfie - also being a meme - it just has a longer tail because it's now applying to this lexical gap.
MA: So there's the usefulness that helps kind of these new words that really percolated on social media stick around. But social media and algorithms, you say, also influence the way people talk - like, their pacing and their tone. Can you talk about how that happens?
ALEKSIC: Yeah. One chapter of the book focuses on the influencer accent. So I talk quickly in real life, clearly.
MA: OK, I was going to ask you about that.
ALEKSIC: (Laughter).
MA: Are you in sort of...
ALEKSIC: Yeah.
MA: ...Teaching influencer mode, or this is the way that you are when you're hanging out with your friends?
ALEKSIC: There's some intermediate thing, right? Every person will accommodate their communication for their expected audience. Right now I'm trying to cram in a bunch of information so people will buy my book.
MA: (Laughter).
ALEKSIC: However, if I'm talking to my friends, I'll use a more laid-back pace 'cause I'm not trying to sell them anything. Online, everybody's trying to sell you attention all the time because the platforms bake in attention incentives so that they're trying to sell you things. They're trying to commodify your data. They're trying to keep eyeballs on the app as long as possible. They make it incentivized to grab your attention, so creators replicate that because we're just trying to earn a living. And then we have all these attention-grabbing tactics replicate, and one of them is the accent. I'll talk faster and I'll stress more words. That's my educational influencer accent. You also have, like, the stereotypical lifestyle influencer accent, which is good at grabbing attention for a different kind of audience. Like, the, hey, guys. Welcome to NPR. You have rising tones, which make it sound like something's always coming next so you keep listening.
MA: I'll have to try this out. Yes.
ALEKSIC: Right.
MA: Yeah.
ALEKSIC: Yeah, it also prevents dead air, which is, like, so bad for the algorithm. So there's new ways of communicating that have emerged. Floor-holding is a concept in linguistics - that people need to make sure people keep listening to them and we've had attention. If you're a teacher in a classroom, you've got to make sure kids are entertained. In another way, though, algorithms, like, really amplify that natural human behavior.
MA: I can see all the utility of this. But I have to admit that, like, I can feel my blood pressure rising as we're having this conversation just 'cause it feels like we're going faster and faster. Can you talk about why at the top of videos, sometimes using, say, like, grammatically incorrect phrases like, no because - like, why does that work so well in engaging people?
ALEKSIC: Well, it's, you know, grammatically incorrect in standard English, but that actually does come from African-American English. But, yes, it sounds compelling because it's confusing. And the no - like, it doesn't indicate opposition to anything. This is just a way of starting a video. But at this point, it's a grammatical feature that people are saying offline. I think it emerged because influencers say it so much to start videos as a confusing way. By the time you're done figuring out what no because means, the influencer's already hooked you in. You've watched past the first second, where 50% of viewers will scroll away. You've watched past that now because they use this interesting phrase that you haven't heard before. And this is one way that language replicates - through confusion.
MA: You know, what's interesting to me about this is that on the one hand, social media is very democratic. Anyone can publish anything they want anytime. And yet, like you say, the way algorithms incentivize certain kinds of posts, the way they drive people to maybe gravitate towards certain accents and certain ways of talking - it kind of also flattens the way people talk.
ALEKSIC: Across these platform trends, there are words that get pushed because they are kind of broadly appealing. And once you put yourself in a box as well, it can narrow your scope of what you're saying. And in the same way, there is a broadly homogenizing trend, even though it seems like we're getting more specialized. And a common theme of algorithms is that there's something kind of paradoxical to it. It does, like you said, elevate more voices in the way that we haven't had before. But at the same time, it prevents those voices from being heard unless they conform to platform incentives.
MA: So when you put it that way, it does seem to kind of cast a slightly negative light on the fact that social media and algorithms are shaping the way that we talk. Is that how you think about it?
ALEKSIC: I don't think there's anything ever wrong with language per se. Language is a way that humans relate to one another. I think language is a proxy for culture, and by following the conduits of language change, you can sort of understand more of where we're heading as a society. I do think the fact that these platforms are commodifying our attention - that seems bad, and you can see that happen through language. But the way we're communicating with one another is just, again, us reflexively adapting to a medium to be heard, and I don't think that's actually bad.
MA: OK. Well, we've been speaking with Adam Aleksic. His new book is called "Algospeak." Am I doing it right? The influencer voice?
ALEKSIC: (Laughter) Perfect.
MA: "Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming The Future Of Language." Adam, thanks again for being with us.
ALEKSIC: Thank you for having me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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