The Tartan

by Hailey Cintron
Junior Staffwriter

Carnegie Mellon’s Activities Board welcomed its first guest speaker of the year last Friday in the McConomy Auditorium, a last minute location change made due to an overwhelming amount of sign-ups. The packed auditorium welcomed the one and only Adam Aleksic, better known as “Etymology Nerd” on social media platforms TikTok and Instagram. He holds a linguistics degree from Harvard University, where he was co-founder and president of the Harvard Undergraduate Linguistics Society. He now works as a linguistics content creator, focused on exploring the intersection between language and social media.

“How many of you are familiar with the word ‘unalive’ as a synonym of kill?” was the opening line Aleksic used to begin his lecture on “How Social Media is Changing Modern Language.” Hands immediately went flying into the air, leading Aleksic to dive straight into the history of the word and how its usage has become widespread in middle school classrooms across the country.

 The term “unalive” was first created to get around TikTok’s algorithm, as the app removes or suppresses any post that uses phrases or words such as “kill” that may violate their community guidelines. Because of this, many adolescents began using the word to talk about death, since it is a less harsh or scary way of doing so — a euphemism. This act of euphemizing words that describe death has been occurring for centuries, as the word decease — for example — came from the Latin word “decessus,” meaning “departed,” which was a euphemism for the original Latin word “mors.” “Apparently, the stoic Romans were as queasy about death as today’s middle schoolers,” Aleksic commented.

He then dove into how the use of the word “unalive” has moved beyond the essays of middle schoolers describing Hamlet’s death to being used in actual public spaces. Last year, the Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle used that very word to describe the suicide of Nirvanna frontman Kurt Cobain on a poster board in one of their exhibits. The exact phrasing was, “Kurt Cobain un-alived himself at age 27.” Aleksic explained how the museum chose to do this in order to call attention to the changing discourse now used to discuss such complex issues. 

Aleksic also discussed how the social media algorithms reward repetition by pushing content that has previously been proven to drive engagement: “The structure of social media is changing where words come from, how those words get popular, and how quickly those words spread.” He explained how creators (like himself) are aware of this and use trending audios, words, or phrases that they know are popular in order to make their content perform better. In the wake of the Rizzler song, for instance, there was an explosion of people making videos with the words “rizz,” “gyatt,” and “skibidi” since they knew those videos would do well — making the words spread even more as a result.

Content creators also use whatever tricks they can to keep their viewers engaged. Aleksic talked about how influencers change the way they speak or talk within their videos in order to grab attention, admitting that he even does it himself in his own content. Influencers have a tone in which they either talk really fast or they end their sentences with an almost question-like pitch, as if they are leaving us hanging in the middle of a thought, waiting for the next one.

Influencers will also say that something is “the MOST shocking” or “the FUNNIEST” thing you’ll hear today at the beginning of the video — rather than saying something is just “funny” or “shocking” — in order to keep people engaged since they will wonder what makes something worthy of earning that superlative as “the most” of something. 

When describing why he and other content creators use these tactics, Aleksic remarked, “I’m competing with millions of other people, all fighting for your attention. On TikTok, you can easily just scroll away at any moment, unlike here where it would be a lot harder for you to just get up and leave.”

Another way in which content creators try to keep their audiences entertained is by creating and spreading new words. Aleksic brought up the suffix “-core” to illustrate this point, highlighting how influencers would use this to describe niche aesthetics like “cottagecore” and “goblincore.” 

TikTok algorithms then decide that words like cottagecore qualify as trending metadata, he explained, causing creators to respond by making more cottagecore content, for example. This propagates the word so more people interact with it, which makes the word trendier.

Aleksic said “this happens because social media algorithms want to make you identify with hyper compartmentalized labels since they can then give you extremely specific commercialized content catering to that identity,” an identity that was created by the algorithm in the first place. 

Aleksic showed the audience a screenshot from TikTok’s business platform website, which claims that “subcultures are the new demographics.” TikTok and its algorithms are thereby driving the mass production of identity building labels in order to profit off of viewers.

While the development of new words can be beneficial monetarily for businesses or entertainingly for viewers, these words can also have negative connotations of which the general public is unaware. An example of this can be seen in the use of language originating in incel culture. 

Aleksic characterized incels as “a dangerous, misogynistic group” who have “perpetrated multiple terrorist attacks that have killed dozens of people, and yet somehow their vocabulary is filtering into Generation Z slang since the algorithm gave these hate groups a space.” 

To illustrate his point, he dove into the etymology of the suffix “-pilled,” which is used to describe interest in a new lifestyle. 

Aleksic claimed that this suffix originally came from the word “blackpilled,” which, according to Aleksic, originally meant “convinced by incel ideology.” On social media, this word has been used more and more by the general public, with Aleksic himself even falling into the trap of enjoying incel related vocabulary. He likes to consume videos about urban design and saw one describing how great it is to be “a parking lot-pilled pavement princess.” Admittedly, he liked this video and ended up getting recommended videos with similar vocabulary as a result — some of which included being “fossil fuel pilled” and a “walkpilled cardiomaxxer.” 

Vocubulary from incel culture can also be seen throughout the previously mentioned “Rizzler” song. One of the lines in the song uses the word “sigma,” which refers to the concept of a “sigma male” that is used by incels “to describe their desired position outside of the social hierarchy.”

Aleksic went on to describe how losing the etymology of such words can lead us to unknowingly harm certain communities. 

“Two of the main demographics that come up with modern slang are the gay and black communities.” 

According to Aleksic, of our most popular internet slang words — such as “slay,” “serve,” “bussing,” “queen,” and “gyatt,” — come from queer or black culture, originating as a form of independence from the confines of white or heterosexual language. 

However, according to Aleksic, the unique words they came up with “were taken away from people who wanted to capitalize on the perceived coolness or comedic value of black and queer culture.” 

For instance, “gyatt” went from an African American Vernacular English pronunciation of the phrase “goddamn” to being used as a noun for “butt.” Aleksic described how when people use this word, its pronunciation is exaggerated in such a way that it “makes a farce of its pronunciation and meaning.”

According to Aleksic, the appropriation of black slang has been normalized for years, but social media has been facilitating this tenfold. 

Even though social media creates spaces for marginalized communities to develop and share their own culture and language with other members of their identity groups, social media also creates situations in which these communities are also opened up just enough that the words they create are spread to the influence of other individuals outside of that culture. 

This pattern of development has led to the formation of the popular slang words we constantly see today, such as “unalive,” “sigma,” and “gyatt.”

Drawing on a common comment he gets on his videos, Aleksic posed the question, “Are we cooked?” to the audience in regards to what he sees as the distortion of vocabulary from oppressed communities and cultures. 

Personally, Aleksic does not believe that we are cooked. Drawing on a modernized version of a poem by English poet Geoffrey Chaucer, Aleksic closed with the following quote that echoes his own personal views on the status of our society’s future development: “You know that the form of speech will change,/ Within a thousand years, and words/ That were once apt, we now regard as quaint and strange/ And yet they spoke them thus/ And succeeded as well in love as men do now.”