105: Linguistics of TikTok - Interview with Adam Aleksic aka EtymologyNerd

Introduction to Lingthusiasm

0:00Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics. I'm Gretchen McCulloch, and I'm here with Adam Aleksic, better known as Etymology Nerd for his online videos and author of the book Algo Speak. And today, we're getting enthusiastic about

0:32analyzing how the structure of social media sites shapes how we communicate on them. But first, some announcements. Our most recent bonus episode is our 100th bonus episode. As a celebration, we are answering your linguistics advice questions, need help navigating whether to correct someone's grammar or copy their accent, or how can I support my peers as they age out of having the coolest slang? We have the advice episode for you. Also, in celebration of our 100th bonus episode, we've decided to go back into the vault and revisit our very first bonus episode. This is a sweary episode about swearing that's a bit too

1:08spicy for the main feed. So now we're releasing this very first bonus episode to anyone who follows us on Patreon. Whether you're at the free or paid level, you can get this extra, extra bonus bonus from the vault with a new intro featuring some extra sweary facts we've learned in the intervening years. Go to patreon.com slash linkthusiasm to get access to these and many more bonus episodes. And also, if you become a patron by July 1st, 2025, you can get a special Linkthusiasm logo sticker with extra linguistics doodles on it sent to you in the mail.

Guest Introduction

1:51Hello, Adam. Adam – Hi, Gretchen. Excited to be here. – Thank you for coming on the show. Before we get into talking a little bit more about linguistics on TikTok and other short-form videos, we're going to start with a question we ask all of our guests, which is, how did you get into linguistics? – Well, my gateway was etymology, like a lot of other people I know. It started in 10th grade. I read Mark Forsyth's excellent book, The Etymology Con. Couldn't get enough of it. Read a bunch of other books. Started a little blog for myself called etymologynerd.com. And then I do like a little daily blog post on etymology. And I kind of keep that up throughout

2:23college where I studied linguistics. And then I asked myself the question that everybody graduated with the linguistics degree asked themselves, which is, what do I do next? And that's when I started making short-form video. – Very, very relatable. What do I do next? So you started a TikTok channel and the rest is history. Did you have some growing steps along the way? – Totally. I wasn't sure if it was going to work. I felt decently confident since I'd made previous etymology infographics and had some experience in the linguistics communication

2:55space. But it was new putting yourself out there on video and learning the ins and outs of the algorithmic medium versus other forms of communication online. But over time, I made it work. And now that's the main thing, apart from the book that I also did. – That's so cool. So some of your previous experience also involved doing linguistic stuff on Reddit? – Yeah, I was posting a lot on Reddit. I made some etymology infographics. And I was posting some fun facts. And that was kind of my first foray into going viral and learning how viral

3:26communication works. Some of those principles still apply to the TikTok in short-form video medium because it's all about grabbing people's attention. It's all about knowing what will work, what is socially popular in a way that is going to go viral.

Public Linguistics History

3:41– So my public linguistics, LingCom history starts visibly with a blog on Tumblr back in the day. – But before that, I had a year or two when I was posting a lot of linguistics links on Facebook, which was mostly to my friends. But people will come out to me and be like, oh, I saw that article you posted. It was really interesting. And so I learned a couple different sort of viral feeds and that sort of fingertip sense that you have of like, oh, if I post this at this particular time on a Friday night, it's more likely that

4:12people are going to see it because they're on this thing, or it's less likely because they're doing something else. That sort of spidey sense. – Well, early algorithms were very much like that, where it was like they actually released what the code was for Reddit. It was a specific algorithm for age decay for a post over time. And you would know that if I wake up and I post in the morning, this post is going to do well. Now they've scrambled it. Now it doesn't matter really when you post. So if I post on TikTok, I could do it at 5 p.m. I could do it at 5 a.m. It's still going to be picked up by the algorithm because what that does is it just continuously re-evaluates whether users are responding to something and then pushes it to more people. So it's like a

4:44completely different style of communication. – Yeah, it's really neat because I tried to put a post up on Facebook the other day using some of the strategies that I'd used like 10, 15 years ago, and it didn't work at all. So they've shifted how this stuff goes. – Yeah. I've consistently found that I can't go viral on Reddit anymore because I'm not in touch with that medium. Because after around 2017, they made their algorithm private. They did what everybody else did, which is they scrambled the feeds. Now I do think you can post any time on Reddit. I think things are a little bit different. Anyway, I have no idea what's

5:15going on there anymore. I'm not on Reddit anymore, but I am tapped into social media in the short form setting.

Short Form Video

5:20– Do you think of it as short form video or vertical video versus horizontal video? Because I feel like the horizontal YouTube videos are an entirely different style. – I think there's absolutely something important to the vertical format that changes the medium and your perception of it. First, there's the fact that it dominates the entire screen and kind of consumes all your attention. The same way when you're watching a movie versus watching a play. When you're watching a play, you see the behind the scenes machinations. You're reminded of the fact that you're watching a play. When you're watching a movie, you can get sucked into the movie. I think long form video, you still know you're watching a video and you're still aware you're watching the YouTube medium. Sometimes when

5:53you're in short form video and the screen is dominating your entire consciousness and your phone's in your hand and you're lying on the side of your bed looking at your doom scrolling videos, you actually forget that you're watching a video and that just becomes the totality of your consciousness, which is kind of a crazy difference in perception. And also, there's something to how you can immediately scroll and the next video is another dopamine hit. So that changes the nature of how these videos get presented to you on the creator side because we know that there's more scarcity for your attention.

Creating Engaging Videos

6:22– So maybe you can walk us through a little bit of like, you know, we don't have the constraints of like trying to make a one-minute video for social media. – Thankfully. – Thankfully, podcasts are a completely different format. I mean, we do have the constraints of like, you can't use graphics on a podcast, which changes how we talk about things. And so I think like every medium is going to have its own type of constraints. So maybe you can walk us through like, what are the steps that you go from like, I have an idea, make a cool video to now this video is online and people are commenting on it. – Yeah, it's not a quick process at all, even though it's like I end up with a one-minute

6:55video. In fact, it takes me a few hours to come up with a topic I find compelling, research it, try to really make sure I'm presenting it accurately, and then script it out in a way that's maximally interesting to my audience because if it's not, people are going to scroll. So I have to very carefully script thinking about how I'm going to retain attention throughout the entire video. And then I film it and edit it down so that it's, again, as engaging as possible so you're not going to scroll away. And finally, I post it into the void and hope

Topic Selection

7:24that it does well. – Let's start with that first step of coming up with topics. Are there some topics that you're like, oh, this does really well. I know this is going to do really well. Or like, I love this topic, but I'm going to do it even though I know it won't do as well. – Absolutely. And I think you have to be faithful to yourself when you're communicating because if it's not fun for you, it's not going to be fun. So I try to balance topics that I know are going to go viral with topics that are personally engaging to me. Oftentimes, those are similar. I'm very interested in internet slang, for example, and I know that's trendy. So talking about internet slang usually does well. But sometimes I want to do a video

7:56on the etymology of chairs, and I do a video on the etymology of chairs. And I know that's not going to do as well, but it's a little one for me or for the devoted fans. But yeah, I do. You do have to be aware of the trends. You have to play into online memes. You have to be aware of the ongoing discourse and the culture of the platforms that you're posting in. – What's an example of a trend that you've jumped on recently? – Back when the Rizzler song came out, that's words like Rizz, Gyat, Skibbity. I was covering those and nobody else is talking about those at the time. And those each got like millions

8:27of views because those words were trending at the time. And I think an important feature of the online ecosystem is that words are metadata. That a word like Skibbity is something that's analyzed by the algorithm and that the algorithm pushes trends from trending audios to trending hashtags to trending words. And when the algorithm sees the word Skibbity, it's going to push the people that are interested in the word Skibbity, which are interested in it because creators are making videos about that. And we're making videos about that because the algorithm is pushing those videos. So we're in this kind of cycle of words being metadata. And I made videos on, for example, the etymology of Skibbity that got millions

8:59of views simply because it was a trending thing at the time. And so you can't really separate online language change right now from words that are trending. – Yeah, it's just part of where language is going. I remember when Skibbity came up at the American Dialect Society Word of the Year, which is how I find out about a lot of the new slang because the American Dialect Society Word of the Year vote, which happens every year in January, is a room of a bunch of linguists and some lexicographers and people like that. And also the occasional person who just happened to be there who nominate from the floor words

9:31of the year and then also vote on them. And what happens every year, which is really fun, is some undergrad or occasionally someone's kid who's a high school student will show up for the very first time and realize that all of these grown-ups don't know what the heck we're talking about and that they hold the keys to what the young people know. And they'll be like, I have to represent my young people. I need to get up with this microphone several times and be like, you guys need to pay attention to Skibbity. So Skibbity doesn't really quite have a meaning. It's just one of these syllables that people say.

10:02– It's a nonsense word and interjection that's just meant to be funny. It can be used as an intensifier, so you can say Skibbity Riz to describe Riz of extreme quality, either good or bad. It can be used in that capacity or it can just be used as a nonsense word. – And Riz comes from charisma, so it's used for the latest cool word that means cool, sort of? – Yeah, yeah. Riz is exactly charisma. And these words have been trending as so-called brain rot. I don't think there's actually anything about them that rots your brain, but they're called brain rot and

10:35encapsulated in this brain rot meme genre of repeating, trending slang words. And that's something we've been seeing since 2023. And there's a lot of new brain rot always emerging. – I remember when I was first pitching Because Internet to publishers, the trendy word that everyone wanted me to talk about, which I did not actually talk about very much, and Because Internet was fleek and on fleek. And this was both the trendy word that younger people were using, and also the word that the media had decided to pick up out of the words the young people were using. And keep decontextualizing and putting in ad campaigns because it was one of those weird

11:11young people words when there can actually be words that young people are using that don't come across to grown-up media people as exciting as something like Skibbity, which has this sort of flavor to it. – Absolutely. I think a big thing that keeps coming up, both in terms of online brain rot humor and in terms of our popular discussion of words is what we call obtrusivity, when a word sticks out. And the word yeet, or… – Oh yeah, that's another one. – You said on fleek. On fleek and yeet came out around the same time as the words selfie,

11:43or cancel for cancel someone online. And yet we didn't think of selfie and cancel as slang words, even though they were. And they evolved from the same cultural moment, but they became a normal part of language, whereas I would say yeet and on fleek died out. And that's probably because they stuck out too much, were thought of as two-generational slang, and then didn't stick. And I think probably a similar thing is going to happen with a lot of brain rot words. Some of them could stick around, though. – Yeah, yeah. Sometimes a word like OK is this 100-plus-year-old word that started as a language fad.

12:13– It was just a meme in 1840s newspapers. – Yeah, exactly. – Exactly. – That stood for all correct, but spelled O-L-L-K-O-R-R-E-C-T. And there were a whole bunch of other ones at the time, and none of them stuck around? – Yeah. So there was a bunch of other, like there's NC or something. There was like a bunch of other Boston newspaper acronyms that just didn't stick. And that's the thing. Language often comes in the form of memes. And sometimes they're tied to the lifespan of memes, and they're going to die out when the meme dies out. But sometimes they're going to fill a lexical gap. They're going to fill this niche in language that we need to have a word for. And then it sticks

12:47around. – I think of this too with internet acronyms like LOL, LOL, and OMG, stuff like that. – And when I was young, and the hot new craze that people were panicking about young people using was internet acronyms. And you'd see them publish these long lists of internet acronyms. And the first couple would always be stuff like LOL, OMG, WTF, that kind of thing. Stuff you've seen, BTW. And then they would just get longer and longer, and you'd be like, is anyone using the acronyms on the bottom half of this list? – Yeah. – Not really. And those have not stuck around. No one's talking about rafflecopters anymore.

13:20– No. Sometimes the acronyms get lexicalized. That is, they become words in popular usage. And actually, it was sort of a meme trend from January to March of this year, 2025, where people are repeating the acronyms ICLPMO as the kind of brain rot acronyms. And they're repeating it simply for the purpose of satirizing the fact that acronyms, absurd sometimes, can become popular. – ICLPMO. I don't know this one. – It's ICLTSPMO, which means I can't lie,

13:50this shit pisses me off. And people are using that online as a sort of acronym brain rot. But it's because it seems a little foreign, a little obtrusive at the start that it's even compelling. – Yeah, it's sort of an ironic acronym that doesn't seem like it should be one of the real ones. – Right, right, yeah. – That's great. But also, only some of them stick around and have staying power. I had a really hard time when Because Internet came out, everyone wanted me to be making the claim that language was changing faster than ever before. And I was like, look, I would love someone to have done this analysis. But first of all,

14:25we need to quantify what we mean by language change. And secondly, we need someone to actually do a comparative study across every decade for the last couple of hundred years. And thirdly, yes, a word can become popular faster than ever before because people can pass it around without media as intermediaries. But then it can die just as fast. So what do we mean by change if it hasn't actually changed the language 10 years later because everyone's forgotten about fleek or skivety or something like that? – Yeah, you've got to define all those things like popularity. I totally agree. And in that sense,

14:56people are always coming up with new words, even for their own familect, the dialect you speak at home, you probably come up with words. Everybody's coming up with words all the time. I think what people mean when they ask that question, though, is probably about is there more broadly popular slang that most people online are aware of happening faster? I do think the answer to that one is yes, because the TikTok and social media short form ecosystem brings viral memes to the forefront a lot faster. They have a lot of time to stew in little niche in-group communities and then blow up beyond that. I think we're having a surge of broad slang that more people are aware of, probably. But again,

15:30it's very hard to do some kind of quantifiable, data-driven analysis on that because how do you even go about finding the data points? – This is my call-out for any academics listening to this of, please, someone do this study. It'd be very interested to see this result because there's an intuitive sense around it, but how much is words becoming popular in my ecosystem or how much is words having a staying power? One of the things that I enjoyed about your book, Algo Speak, was you talked about this sort of structure of how you go about writing a script for a video and the attention-grabbing

16:02tactics that you use in terms of getting people's attention, having them not click away or scroll away within that first couple seconds. Do you want to talk about that a little bit more? – Absolutely. Attention is the most important thing in the online medium. 50% of your viewers will scroll away in the first second of the video. And over time, your retention rate, that's how long people are watching the video, is going to drop more and more unless you keep engaging your audience. And the TikTok algorithm sees that. You see it too, as a creator. You have video analytics that tell you when people stop watching.

16:33But the TikTok algorithm continuously reevaluates whether people are paying attention or video, and it only pushes it to new audiences if people are still paying attention. So it's not like broadcast media. So a podcast, for example, literally comes from iPod plus broadcast where everybody tuning into this podcast, here's our message. There's no virality to it. But in algorithmic media, which is a completely different style of communication, your message reaches a few people initially and then only spreads beyond that if it has some broader compelling factor. Otherwise, you're going to be stuck in the jail of 300 views on all your videos. So that

17:03means you have to get attention to some degree. You can't avoid that fact. And that means you sort of have to play into the contentification or entertainment factor of social media where anything educational also needs to be entertaining to some degree. I need to script out viral hooks. I need to use little micro hooks throughout my videos to keep people engaged. I use a different accent in the social media medium because I know that'll keep my audience more engaged. How would you describe the difference of that accent? I'll stress more words to keep you entertained. I'll probably speak a little bit faster because then

17:36people either have to rewind, which is good for engagement, or they'll comment on how fast I'm speaking, which is good for engagement. Yeah, it just seems to be a good thing to speak faster. So in some cases, being less understandable makes people comment on it to try to understand you? Yeah. Anything that generates comments is good. So that's unfortunately means that sometimes videos that aren't actually good for you go viral, like rage bait, click bait, stuff that just generates comments and people hate watch it, it still goes viral. So a lot of online stuff is that.

18:06It's important to remember that these algorithms are not actually for you. They're for maximizing your engagement online, which is a different thing than actually what you want to see. And sometimes they'll push stuff that is simply stuff that will get clicks and attention from you. So you had a couple examples of sort of templates that you use to create those hooks or to create that sort of attention from the first place, like one of my favorite this or something like that. Yeah, I think you kind of have to use superlatives. So I'll say my favorite thing about this is that, or this is the best something, or this is the most interesting thing about that. Because

18:39if you just say, oh, this is one thing that's sort of interesting, people will scroll away, because the next video underneath you is going to have the most interesting of something. So you need to have the most interesting of something to keep that audience engaged. And if you don't, people are going to scroll. It feels to me like, you know, you go to a pizza shop and they're like, world's best pizza. And I'm like, I don't think you actually did a survey of all the pizza shops in the world. I think you're just making this claim because like, probably you have pretty good pizza. Exactly. I think that's a good analogy. It's important to note that these attentional tactics and everything else I'm talking about is not actually something that's new. It's always

19:11been a thing that humans need attention in order to do something. It's just a little compounded in the algorithmic medium, I would say, where attention is more important because of that ability that you have to scroll and find a more engaging video. So attentional tactics are always there, whether you write a journalistic article, you need a hook, whether you start a podcast, you need an intro, you're always going to need attention. But it's just more important in algorithmic communication. Yeah. I think as somebody who makes a podcast and does not especially make TikTok videos or videos for any of the algorithmic sites, I think that podcasts feel a little bit different to me

19:45because on the one hand, we don't have any episodes that go viral. Virality, viral episodes doesn't really exist for podcasts and for podcasting as a medium. But on the other hand, any episode of Lingthusiasm could be someone's very first episode. They may never have listened before and so there's a certain amount of context that we need to set. On the other hand, when people get into Lingthusiasm and they're like, oh, this podcast sounds cool, they very often go back and listen from the very beginning or in the other direction, they'll listen to a whole lot of episodes. We have very similar amounts of listens across different episodes, which is not

20:19something that I've seen on online video creators where you'll have a few very viral videos and then others that sort of sync maybe without a trace or get that like 300. So 300 is approximately the number of viewers that TikTok shows a video to to decide whether more people are going to watch it. Yeah, you start with like 300 views, then you send it to the next round and then you pass like 2000 views or something. There's like cycles to how it perpetuates things. I do think sometimes, you know, people go through your profile and look at things, but I absolutely agree that short form video is a completely different medium in that it's much more fragmentary in how you

20:51perceive it. Each video is disjointed, presented separately from the others, and you often don't go onto individual creators' profiles. There's less of a personal connection with the audience, which is why if you are communicating online, you do need to build a personal brand, which is an important way to keep attention still. Yeah. But like the flip side of it is you also have podcasts that have like zero listens or free listens or whatever. Like you don't have that sort of built in 300, you know, to see if anyone else wants to see it. Sure. I would say 300 really means nothing. 300 just means that 300 people got the video.

21:21They might have all scrolled away. Oh, yeah. But like when you start a podcast, you have no guaranteed starter views. Yeah. Like you can put up an episode and get literally zero views. Well, it's also, I resonate a lot more if I listen to 45 minutes of you talking than if I just watch a one minute explainer video from some person I've never seen before. There's much more of a personal connection in podcasting probably. Oh, yeah. Like for podcast listeners are very loyal, but it's also hard to get them in the first place because like for me to start listening to a new podcast is such a huge commitment. Conversely, there's probably more parasociality with the video medium where

21:51people resonate more with the person's face. So both have their pros and cons in terms of like how an audience connects with you. But that does have like downstream implications to how you perceive the message when you're receiving it. Yeah, absolutely. I remember switching from blogging first to podcasting and like we got something like three fan emails in the first week of starting this podcast. And Lauren and I had both been blogging for like 10 years before that and had gotten like maybe one to three fan emails combined over the previous 10 years because suddenly people could hear our voices. They were like,

22:22oh, this is something completely different. Yeah, there absolutely is something more to that human connection. Maybe that's why short form video is also compelling. It is a human presenting. I mean, now we're having more and more AI, but I think we're still drawn to to human production. And when we see people talk, we see their video and their audio. There's something there. Yeah, absolutely. So you did a linguistics undergrad degree?

Government and Linguistics

22:44Yeah, I studied government and linguistics, actually, which I always find are way more connected than people expect them to be. Oh, tell us more about the connection between government and linguistics. Well, my parents are Serbian. My background was in researching how Serbo creation language policy affects language identity. And the takeaway there was that creations are more polarized about their language identity than Serbians are. But that still has sent me down this rabbit hole today where I can't separate how certain restrictions affect your language. For example, there's government

23:15restrictions on what can be said in certain countries. In China, you can't say the word censorship on the internet, because that's censored. So people say stuff like harmonious, which was an allusion to the CCP's goal of a harmonious society. And then the Chinese government started censoring that too. And then people started saying river crab, because that sounds similar to the word harmonious. But then that started being censored. So people started saying aquatic product instead of river crab. So the government censorship is actually affecting people's language in real time. And this is happening on US platforms too. There's no direct government

23:49censorship of free speech. But there is like section 230 of the Communications Act of 1934, which says that the platforms have complete control over what we can say. So that means that we're subjected to platform terms of service. I can't say kill on TikTok, for example, but it can say on a lot. So some people have started saying that as a form of algo speak speech meant to evade algorithmic censorship. That makes sense. So do you feel like your background in linguistics makes you want to analyze the the interplay of how people are communicating with the algorithm more? Absolutely. I think both on the government side and the linguistic side, there is some

24:19sociological thing that's really interesting to me here. It's how we connect with one another, both on a government level and a linguistics level, right? And the whole goal of online communication is hopefully connecting with a creator on the viewer end or connecting with your viewers on the creator end. And that means that sometimes we use language in a way that we can connect to more people. Sometimes that means using euphemisms like on a live. And sometimes that means using more attention-grabbing language, which I think is evolving at the same time as words in general.

24:51So you started doing all these TikTok videos. You have a very successful following on TikTok. And then you started working on a book about algo speak, which should be out shortly after this episode airs. So if you're listening from the future, it should be out already. And how was that shift from writing scripts for one minute videos to writing a much, much longer form and much less multimedia and all of these things? What was that shift like for you?

Writing a Book

25:14It was a little relieving, honestly. I feel like I had this academic urge that wasn't being satisfied with the TikTok videos. And it was really nice to be able to get my more nuanced thoughts out, because it's really frustrating that TikTok makes you present things as cohesive stories, cohesive narratives. Which is, if it's not presented as one linear point A to point B story, it's not going to go viral because it's too complicated for viewers, unfortunately. But it's like, you've got to present that all in a minute. Yeah, that too. That too. You've got to do it quickly. You've got to do it without nuance.

25:46And that means you often leave out important details. And etymology is often a very messy thing where it's not actually point A to point B, but oh, word C influenced how the spelling of word A changed to word B, right? Even though it wasn't related. Stuff like that, where you can't really add in that nuance. And it's nice to also mix short form and long form media where long form, you can give kind of detail to your thoughts. I remember when I was writing Because Internet, I had to learn how to write without hyperlinks. Yeah, that's a pain for me too. It's so hard. Because I'd gotten so used to writing for internet places, whether for my blog or

26:21somewhere like Wired or something, I could write an article. And if I'm using a word that I don't know if people are going to know what it means, I can just hyperlink it to like a Wikipedia article, and then I don't have to worry about it. I mostly had to learn to write less academic because my background, again, was in researching the server creation language. And I was writing for like my four thesis advisors. So I'm used to like communicating informally on algorithmic media, but I had to kind of adapt, kind of combine my academic writing with my informality online and

26:51turn that into a popular linguistics book. Yeah, that makes sense. Writing without hyperlinks was so weird because you have to, when I'm writing for like a blog or an article for somewhere, I have sort of an imagined audience of like, who am I imagining reading this based on the readership of an existing platform? Whereas before you write a book, you don't know who's going to actually read that book. Like, who am I imagining reading this? Really? I would say there's a greater mismatch on short form video. I have sort of an idea who my book audience is. I have a sort of an idea. There's gonna be people who are young who are

27:23interested in slang. There's going to be people who are old who are interested in what's up with the internet right now. And what are the youth doing? Yeah. Yeah. When I make a video on short form media, I actually have no idea who that's going to be sent to because the algorithm is going to intercept it, reevaluate what it thinks that message is, which may not be what the actual message is or what my intent was, and then send it to an audience that's going to maximize engagement, not necessarily, again, the audience that I wanted. So here's an example. Let's say I'm a left-wing social media political activist creating videos on TikTok, and I'm stitching, like kind of creating a response to

27:55a right-wing video. I intend for my stitch to be a rebuttal kind of to the original right-wing video and to be sent to that audience. But no, the algorithm is not going to do that. It's going to reinterpret it as a left-wing video, send it to a different left-wing audience. And now everybody feels happy because they're in their social media echo chambers, and that kind of probably contributes to the hyperpolarization we're seeing today. So you think, okay, well, a book, like at least I have some level of control over that audience. Yeah. And at least the audience kind of probably has a feel that I'm writing a book for them. I think there's a phenomenon in social media. It's called context collapse. You see the video on the For You page. It's called For You.

28:30But I may not have made that video for you. I usually don't think that much about. I just kind of create videos that I think are interesting and send them out into the void and then they're perceived. And it may not have been for you. I'm sorry. But the book was probably meant for my target readership. I love the book where Dana Boyd coined this concept of content collapse because it's called It's Complicated, The Social Lives of Network Teens. And she went around and did for her dissertation hundreds of sociological interviews with teenagers over the course of 10 years. So she

29:02starts with MySpace and ends up at Instagram because she has this exact period when parts of it are, you know, what we think of as modern social media. Oh, yeah. Moment of transition. That's crazy. Yeah. Yeah. But she just captures this period between MySpace, which is really old school, to Instagram, which is still around. People are still using it. And has all of these themes that come up from what teenagers are doing, how they're interacting with each other, with their parents, and all of this sort of stuff. And it was huge influence when I was writing Because Internet that I was like, I can't go do 10 years of detailed ethographic interviews because I don't have that kind of

29:36book. It used to be a PhD dissertation. But the respect that she treats her interview subjects and like, okay, why are people doing what they are doing and the sort of curiosity that she brings to people's practices and the fact that it felt like her findings still applied even though obviously some of the social media sites that she was writing about were defunct by the time she was writing about them. Yeah, that's so important. And I think there's often a tendency to write off new language as brain rot. And kind of one thing I was hoping in my book is I know a lot of the slang

30:10is going to be outdated once the book comes out. And maybe even some platforms are going to be gone. Who knows? That's inevitable. It just happens. Yeah. But the trend is about algorithmic media shaping our language. And I do think we're kind of at this new cultural linguistic inflection point where we're in a different medium and it's shaping how we speak in a new way. Each platform has its own ways of shaping our communication. And the context collapse thing can be really interesting when you consider the age of different things on social media. You might see a Tumblr screenshot on Instagram today that was actually written in like 2013. And it was

30:43written for a different time period is written for a different cultural like audience. And now you're perceiving it now, which you weren't the audience for that. But you're going to think that you were because it was in your home page of your Reels tab or something. The initial context in which she has contacts collapse, which I find so funny because it was a period that I lived through but also is not quite what's going on right now, was when there was this period of like Facebook being like the cool thing that the young people were using, you know, university students, high school students. And then there was a few years later, the second period when everyone's

31:13parents joined Facebook. And so instead of suddenly like sending this message that's just to your friends who are all your age, which was my first experience with Facebook, you're now sending this message and your aunt or something is commenting on it like, oh, it's so nice to see you having such a good time. Or possibly worse if you're posting photos from being at a party or something that aren't necessarily something you want your parents to see maybe. And so having this collapsed context because people's imagines audience has suddenly shifted even within the same feed. And then this additional thing of like, once you get a sort of viral object on social media, it goes viral across

31:48different platforms. Like I don't use Reddit very much, but I see Reddit screenshots all over the place. When something says something funny on Reddit, it just gets passed around that being passed around and like uprooted from its original context and replanted elsewhere. Yeah, I think I joined Facebook right on the cusp of that moment of transition. So maybe the two years before me were like the pre parent era, and I joined maybe slightly more in the parent era, but I could see like, just by knowing that people two years older than me, that this was like a difference that occurred. It's super interesting. And the reason I referred to social media as the

32:21void earlier is that once you send it out, it's out there. And that's, if your parents ever warned you about like, you know, putting stuff out on the internet, that's true. It's once it's out, it's out there, and you can't control where it's going, you can't control who repurposes your message. So I guess you should be very deliberate about how you communicate. And also, like, there is a saying that the internet is forever. And yet, there's also so much, like, link rot of like, oh, this link used to work, and then they've stopped paying for the hosting of that site. And now the site is down. And, you know, how are we supposed to see it? Like, because internet has a

32:54lot of stuff about Twitter, it's not called that the Twitter links may or may not work in a few years, because that's not something that that happens now. And a lot of Vine videos are gone. Yep. Anytime, like, 4chan, for example, is a source of, like, 50% of all memes from, like, 2010 to 2016, and all their, like, stuff on 4chan decays after one day. So you have no idea, like, where a lot of memes come from. Yeah. So you're sort of in this etymological paradox, where it's so abundant and so full of information that you can draw from and do so much amazing analysis. But at the same time, stuff disappears.

33:28And there's also so much to weed through that it's kind of harder to do research in another way. So it's kind of interesting. Yeah, absolutely. And especially with video where, like, text can sort of get archived, like, Internet Archive is pretty good at text. Whereas I don't think they do a lot of ingesting of video or multimedia, because it's much more storage space. But on the other hand, like… I mean, that's data intensive, yeah. Where is that sort of supposed to go? Like, the stuff that you want to erase from the internet is still on there, and the stuff you want to preserve isn't necessarily on there.

33:59Yeah, I've seen it referred to as a digital dark age. There's terabytes of information being uploaded to the internet every day that's never seen by anyone, never will be. You know, some stuff that's just going to be forgotten. It's kind of mind-boggling to take in. And also, a lot of digital formats aren't particularly good at the archiving thing. So, like, a book, like, you have it on your shelf, you can rediscover a book in, like, the attic a hundred years later, and the pages will still open, you know? Whereas, like, a CD that's a hundred years old, it doesn't read anymore.

34:30A CD that's 30 years old is beginning to be the end of its lifespan. Yeah, that's one reason that I was drawn to write a book. I've been getting into the theories of Harold Innes recently, a Canadian communications scholar, and he differentiates between time-biased media and space-biased media. Oh, tell us about that. Time-biased media is media that has longevity, media that will, like, oral traditions. Think about medieval scholars, like, hand-copying manuscripts. But it's very intensive. It's like, it's hard to communicate to a lot of people at once, and it takes a while to produce, but it stays around for a while. So I think in our modern age, a book is a good analogy,

35:02where a book, again, you can pick up a book from 1900, it's still going to be something you can read. The other kind of media is space-biased, which takes up space. Think about, like, newspapers being created every day, social media content being created every day, and it can reach huge demographics of people. But it's like part of this cycle that it immediately becomes outdated, and then we create more of it. And so social media is very much a space-biased medium. And I think Innes would definitely see it that way. Whereas a book is more on the time-biased side. And I think his main argument, the reason that he laid this out, and again,

35:34this is me coming at this from a government and linguistics angle, that a well-functioning society should have a mixture of time-biased and space-biased media, where you can, one, communicate historical ideas, because if everything's space-biased, you're going to forget about bad things in the past, and then repeat those mistakes. But you also want an ability to challenge the status quo and continual kind of questioning about what's going on, and that's where space-biased media is good. So I think it's best to balance. Yeah. And you said people who take it on themselves to archive the space-biased media,

36:06people who create microfiche archives of newspapers or digitized newspapers so that we can access them later because they are also part of the historical record, even though the newsprint that they're printed on is literally so flimsy. Or the social media site can just go down and then all the posts don't work. But part of that was the historical record of a historical event as it was happening, a protest or some sort of big news event. You want to be able to see that stuff. Yeah. Turning space-biased media into time-biased media. That's, I guess,

36:38another hope of the book documenting this exact inflection point in language history. Yeah. I definitely had the impression with Because Internet that I was like, okay, I'm trying to analyze now, but I'm also writing a history book. Yeah. Because I read David Crystal's book about language on the internet, which was published in 2001, which is a long time ago in internet years. And it has all this stuff about old school chat rooms and stuff like this. Usenet and stuff. Yeah. Yeah. I would say both books are very influential to me. And I also try to write my book in the past tense as much as possible because I know it's going to be outdated. You can't determine what's going to

37:12change. But then you also need, it's also a history book because now when I read David Crystal's book, I'm not like, oh, this is so outdated. Because if you read a book about the internet, like, two or three years after it came out, that's the worst. Because it's like claiming to be about the present and yet it's sort of palpably not about the present. But then when you read it 10 plus years later, it's like, well, this is not about the present anymore. But now it's a historical archive of this very ephemeral era. Yeah. Some stuff still rings true. I think because internet now is like canonized,

37:43where the stuff you talked about with typographical tone of voice, that's still so true. That's like where emoji use, this is all still very relevant, even if we're not using the same emojis. Emojis do evolve like words. Like we went from the laughing emoji to the crying emoji to the skull emoji to express humor online. But we're still using emojis to express humor. There's still kind of this sort of punctuation and addition to your tone of voice. So the underlying principles still really applies. And it's good that we have that time-biased perspective on it. Yeah. And I think when I was writing Because Internet, I was very aware that video was sort

38:16of coming, but there wasn't enough meta reflection on it that I felt like I could include a whole chapter on it. I remember thinking, I wish someone was analyzing YouTube. There's so much stuff going on on YouTube. And then in the time between when Because Internet was being copyedited and when it was actually published, TikTok took off in that six-month span. And I was like, well, okay, someone else is going to have to write this book. That's not what's going on here. I would love to see more analyses of like Zoom and like video chat communications. I tried to find stuff about

38:48Skype back in the day, but there wasn't a lot of research. And I bet a lot of people are writing those papers now. I feel like AI is going to really be shaping our communication in ways that we can't quite pinpoint right now, but are going to be huge in five years. Like large language models overusing certain words or AI-generated videos are now they're, you know, they have the five-fingered humans instead of the weird, distorted people, and you have actual text. So it can actually stand in for real communication. And what does that mean? What is the future of how we're perceiving AI-generated

39:22communication? I think it's going to have a big impact on what we're perceiving in the future, but it's really hard to pinpoint that now. And it's also such a shifting cultural moment. It's hard to tell. I mean, stay tuned for, you know, five or 10 years. We'll have a Linkthusiasm episode where we're going to be the linguist who writes that book. There's a word that AI-generated text uses a lot that humans don't use that much. I'm trying to remember what it is. There's Delve, Commendable, Meticulous. There's the M-dash. There's a lot of it. And we've researched showing that there has been like a 2,000% uptick in research papers written with the word Delve in the past three years, simply because people are using Chachi Petit to write

39:57their research papers. So it's a little concerning. Maybe, I don't know. But I wonder if there's going to be like a backlash of even people who would have used Delve before are like, oh, I can't say Delve now because it's going to look like my paper is being written with AI. I think there is. I've seen people being criticized for using the M-dash because it looks like AI. And I'm an M-dash enjoyer. So that's bad news for me, I guess. My editor had to tell me to delete so many M-dashes.

40:22I definitely think there's like an anti-AI backlash that we're really going to be seeing. And it's kind of concerning in another sense, because a lot of these words, Delve, commendable, meticulous, are overused because the people used to train the large language models disproportionately come from like Nigeria and Kenya, where those words actually are used at that rate. But when you look at American academia, it's not. So now people from those places are going to be targeted more for talking like AI. Yeah, which is such an interesting twist to why AI is doing that particular type of grammar that we could learn more about how people are talking in those areas. But then they get unfairly

40:55stigmatized for sounding like an AI, even though the AI really sounds like them in the first place. Yeah. Adam, thank you so much. It's been great having you on the show. If you could leave people knowing one thing about linguistics, what would it be? I think the theme to a lot of what we've been talking about today is a phrase popularized by another Canadian, Marshall McLuhan, that the medium is the message. And the way you perceive the message through a different platform, for example, really affects your understanding of it. And TikTok has a different way of sending a message than a podcast format. And all this will change

41:31how we as humans can relate to each other, which is very important to keep considering. So I would urge people to not forget that the medium is the message. For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us at all the podcast platforms or lingthusiasm.com. You can get transcripts of every episode at lingthusiasm.com slash transcripts. And you can follow at Lingthusiasm on all the social media sites. You can get scarves with lots of linguistics patterns on them, including the International Phonetic Alphabet, branching tree diagrams,

42:04booba and kiki, and our favorite esoteric Unicode symbols, plus other Lingthusiasm merch, like t-shirts with Gavaguy the rabbit on them, and aesthetic IPA posters at lingthusiasm.com slash merch. Lauren's social media and blog is Superlingo, and links to my social media can be found at gretchenmcculloch.com. My blog is allthingslinguistic.com. My book about internet language is called Because Internet. You can follow our guest, Adam Aleksic, on TikTok, Instagram, Substack as Etymology Nerd, and his book is called Algo Speak. Lingthusiasm is able to keep existing thanks to the support of our patrons. If you want to get

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43:07too. We also really appreciate if you can recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone in your life who's curious about language. Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gaughan. Our senior producer is Claire Gaughan. Our editorial producer is Sarah Doppiarella. Our production assistant is Martha Tzui-Billens. Our editorial assistant is John Crook. And our technical editor is Leah Velman. Our music is Ancient City by The Triangles. Stay Lingthusiastic!