Language is always changing, but these days it seems to be moving at warp speed. Whether it's the shift from 😂 to 💀 or the rise of “brain rot,” internet slang is taking over, and if you want to keep up with what's cool (another slang word, from another century), you need to be online. But if you aren’t keen on spending hours scrolling through TikTok, etymology nerd Adam Aleksic is more than happy to explain how social media is making new words go viral. In his new book, Algospeak, Aleksic expands on the ways the algorithm is shifting speech from the perspective of both a linguist and an insider: he scrutinizes influencer accents, memes, in-group slang, censorship evasion, subtweeting, and attention-grabbing morphology. And though these newfangled words and phrases may astonish you, what's most surprising is how fundamentally old the story of language change really is.
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