Saved by Ben Percifield
Leg Booty? Panoramic? Seggs? How TikTok Is Changing Language
Language can contain an entire world, revealing its speakers’ history, values, or pathologies. It can also be obfuscating, diversionary, slippery. Chattiness, with its personality-driven appeals to familiarity, can conceal or elide false promises, banality, emptiness, controversy, and the context of its own existence
Anna Wiener • The Age of Chat
There’s a reason, for instance, that TikTok has declared not just a handful of but twenty-something aesthetics to be the next big thing in 2022: It’s because TikTok’s bread and butter is creating microtrends that flare up fast and die out faster. Whether or not they actually last (or exist in any meaningful way at all) is besides the point; as Kels... See more
Rebecca Jennings • Fashion is just TikTok now
With TikTok coming into the equation, these usages of the word “rizz” were spread more widely outside their natural habitat. What was once a piece of slang only accessible by certain communities became a word that could appear on anyone’s For You page on Tiktok. Once a term is exposed to the massive Tiktok user base by the algorithm, its popularity... See more
Gabriel McCarthy • Why is Our Vocabulary Changing So Much?
It’s the same scenario when certain words are banned by a given social media platform. New funny euphemisms are developed.
Michael Malice • The New Right: A Journey to the Fringe of American Politics
What the popularization of slugging on the internet represents is an ongoing, and unmistakably American, battle over ownership: the masking of cultural theft as cultural literacy. It should come as no surprise that slugging videos have garnered hundreds of millions of views. TikTok’s fabric is woven through with appropriation. Ownership is a shared... See more
Jason Parham Culture • The Age of Everything Culture Is Here
Words have always changed meaning, and the internet has only accelerated this process.