How words go from obscurity to vitality to the linguistic dustbin of the past.<\/p>\n
Recently, I wanted to describe something as \u201cunprecedented\u201d, but couldn\u2019t bring myself to. Even typing the word now, I can almost smell the hand sanitiser, feel the phantom tickle of a face mask, and see nightmarish flashbacks of another 1pm press conference. It was, after all, one of the buzzwords of the Covid era.<\/p>\n
That word \u2013 \u201cera\u201d \u2013 is now ruined for me, too. Taylor Swift\u2019s Era\u2019s Tour colonised it to the point that I can no longer enter a new phase of life without feeling like I should be shimmying in a sequinned bodysuit and knee high boots.\u00a0<\/p>\n
So, what happens to these now-tainted buzz words?\u00a0And why do we become so allergic to them?<\/p>\n
Plucked from relative obscurity, repeated millions of times, meme-ified and stretched beyond their original meaning, they leave behind a sort of linguistic hangover. Popularised words tend to run their course and are then immortalised, forever tied to a particular time. Describe something as \u201cnifty\u201d, \u201cgroovy\u201d or \u201cswell\u201d, and people might wonder if you\u2019re a historic imposter \u00e0 la The Brady Bunch Movie. Refer to someone as your \u201cbae\u201d or \u201cboo\u201d and you\u2019ll appear to have been cryogenically frozen since 2013. But is the internet the reason we cycle through buzz words at such alarming speed?<\/p>\n
\u201cOnline, the capital is attention,\u201d explains Dr Andreea Calude, an associate professor in linguistics at the University of Waikato. \u201cAttention is the thing that drives online engagement\u2026 that really motivates innovation.\u201d She points to the chronically online world putting pressure on people to produce new buzzwords \u201cthat attracts attention \u2013 the novelty.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sometimes the buzz words are genuine neologisms \u2013 think \u201clooksmaxxing\u201d (a compound of two words) or \u201cdelulu\u201d, (a shortened and jazzed up version of delusional) \u2013 but often, they\u2019re merely a plain old word, suddenly thrust into the spotlight.<\/p>\n
In August 2024, content creator Jools LeBron sent \u201cdemure\u201d on a stratospheric rise to briefly dominate popular culture. Her viral \u201cvery demure, very mindful\u201d videos were viewed tens of millions of times.<\/p>\n
Brands, eager to show they had their finger on the pulsing heart of the zeitgeist, jumped on the trend. Zillow appointed LeBron its \u201cChief Demure Officer\u201d, while everyone from Southwest Airlines to Netflix found a way to work the viral phrase into their marketing.<\/p>\n
A decade earlier, teenager Kayla Newman described her perfectly groomed eyebrows as being \u201con fleek\u201d. The missive became the phrase du jour, quickly expanding to mean \u201canything excellent\u201d, eventually arriving at the surest sign of slang ubiquity: corporate marketing. Global pancake empire IHOP started tweeting that its \u201cpancakes were on fleek\u201d. Taco Bell soon followed suit, declaring its \u201cTaco\u2019s on fleek\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But like Icarus flying too close to the sun, brands tend to discover that by the time they get their hands on a buzz word, it may not remain cool much longer. Taco Bell\u2019s coup de grace came when its then-CEO Brian Niccol butchered the phrase as \u201con cleek\u201d during an investor presentation. Determined to recover from the gaffe, Taco Bell introduced \u201cMillennial Word of the Week\u201d, in which employees in their 20s explained trending slang to management via a companywide email. Words including \u201clit\u201d were even displayed on screens throughout its corporate offices.<\/p>\n
Dr Calude explains the whole point in having your own language is a \u201cmembership affiliation\u201d to signal \u201cyou\u2019re one of us. Slang is just another in-group way for a generation of a certain age to recognise people of their own kind.\u201d She says. So of course, when a middle-aged pancake exec starts calling things \u201cdemure\u201d it\u2019s bound to be less appealing, and demure is swiftly demurred by the cool kids.<\/p>\n
My aversion to \u201cunprecedented\u201d certainly hasn\u2019t hurt the word\u2019s prospects. Professor Kate Burridge, a linguist at Monash University, says the word has taken off since Covid, although perhaps with a weakened meaning. Once meaning something never seen or done before, it is now used less literally, simply to mean exceptionally large.<\/p>\n
Burridge explains that while words can die out from neglect, \u201coveruse can also kill them.\u201d\u00a0Some fallen buzz words aren\u2019t extinct, but remain dormant. Burridge points to what linguist Dylan Hughes calls the \u201cfunny cycle\u201d, a word or phrase becomes funny, then unfunny, then is used ironically \u2013 until a later generation, who are no longer in on the joke, start to use it sincerely again.<\/p>\n
Sometimes a new word was there all along, and we just didn\u2019t realise. Take \u201cunfriend\u201d.\u00a0I\u2019d assumed this to be a modern word, meaning: to remove someone as a friend on\u00a0a social media platform. But Dr Calude tells me the word long predates Facebook, tracing back centuries where it was used as a noun, meaning the opposite of friend, an enemy, an unfriend.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It seems every generation harbours fears that the generation below it is bastardising the language. In the early 2000s, there was much pearl clutching over the filler \u201clike\u201d being far too liberally peppered through speech, seeming to appear at ever-shorter intervals the younger the speaker.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s easy to see how dilution through overuse \u2013 or, what linguists call \u201clinguistic bleaching\u201d \u2013 can burn through words. The word \u201cawesome\u201d literally once meant to inspire awe, now it can be used to describe an above-average burger. A few years ago, I heard a radio ad in which an enthusiastic narrator proclaimed that Christmas was \u201cliterally around the corner\u201d, something that is literally impossible.<\/p>\n
Dr Calude has reassurance.\u00a0\u201cIt\u2019s OK that language changes. It\u2019s OK that there\u2019s semantic bleaching. Don\u2019t worry, the whole language isn\u2019t going to lose all its expressive power and creativity. Where there\u2019s bleaching in one corner, there\u2019s new innovation in another corner, and new forms sprouting up.\u201d<\/p>\n
So most buzz words end up hung out to dry but there are some outliers \u2013 words that appear to have beaten the odds, enduring decades of liberal use without showing signs of slipping out of fashion. Perhaps the greatest survivor of all is the word \u201ccool\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cCool\u201d has been in frequent use for around 90 years and, to this day, sounds just as appropriate uttered by a war veteran as it does on the lips of a gum chewing teen. No longer simply meaning fashionable or culturally \u201cin\u201d it can describe an item, person, feeling, place or song. Unlike so many of its fallen linguistic peers, \u201ccool\u201d prevails. But why?\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cSome words become entrenched, and they kind of just stay, because they\u2019re just so frequent\u2026but the trade-off.. is that they do become semantically bleached, so their semantic force is decreased.\u201d Explains Dr Calude.\u00a0\u201cCool is a little bit \u2026 bleached of meaning. It\u2019s a bit plain and not very exciting.\u201d\u00a0It seems the success of \u201ccool\u201d was due to it not trying to hard \u2013 essentially \u201ccool\u201d was able to stay cool by being \u2026 cool.\u00a0<\/p>\n
When \u201ccool: became popular all those years ago, no one could have guessed at its lingering success. How could they have? That type of staying power is so rare, it\u2019s practically unprecedented.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"How words go from obscurity to vitality to the linguistic dustbin of the past. Recently, I wanted to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":634021,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[138,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-634020","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-business","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/634020","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=634020"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/634020\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/634021"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=634020"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=634020"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=634020"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}