The Linguistic Science behind Viral Social Media Slang
Linguist Adam Aleksic explains how viral slang and algorithm-driven speech aren’t destroying language––they’re accelerating its natural evolution.
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Rachel Feltman: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman.
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It might feel like the rise of “brain rot” is literally rotting brains, but Adam argues that supposed Internet gibberish actually follows the same patterns humans have used to create language for thousands of years; the difference is just the speed and scale. And far from dumbing down the discourse these new words and phrases often crop up to serve important social functions.
Scientific American associate editor and sometimes sub-in Science Quickly host Allison Parshall recently sat down with Adam to chat about this brave new linguistic world. Here’s their conversation.
Allison Parshall: How would you describe your linguistic upbringing [on] the Internet? What was your, like, formative experiences there?
So that was my first experience, like, learning how to go viral on the Internet, but it was also just …
Parshall: Hmm.
Aleksic: Like, my encounter with the Internet as a person. And then, I don’t know, after high school I stopped going on Reddit. I was pretty offline most of college, and then, when I was graduating with a linguistics degree and didn’t know [laughs] what to do, a friend suggested, “Hey, maybe you should try making videos.” And I was like, “Well, I know how to go viral; I might as well give it a shot. It’s better than anything else.” [Laughs]
Aleksic: Yeah, I do remember early slang words and being fascinated by them, and this was all from Vine, really: like “on fleek” or “bae” …
Parshall: “Yeet.”
Aleksic: Or “fam.” “Yeet.”
Parshall: Yeah.
Aleksic: All that. There were the 4chan words bleeding into Reddit …
Parshall: Mm.
Aleksic: So I did see the words like “pilled” and “maxxing” and that stuff before, like, it started really leaking into the mainstream. So that was definitely stuff I was aware of and interested in because I was interested in language, [though I] didn’t really start analyzing slang for my job until after college. But, like, reflecting, like, post—after the fact, you really start to see, “Wow, this is what was happening then,” and it’s useful to have been in the weeds.
Parshall: My crucible was Tumblr. And I’m using this …
Aleksic: Right.
Parshall: Like, slightly as a segue because one of the memes that I first saw on there that became so popular even more recently, to the point where it made the transition over to TikTok, was the “mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell” meme. This is, like, slightly self-referential because I recently learned that Scientific American coined that; it was, like, the first use of the phrase …
Aleksic: Really? Wow.
Parshall: In 1957.
Aleksic: [Laughs]
Parshall: And I’m curious, like, not to put you on the spot, but I am curious if you know anything about that meme or just, like, how you’ve encountered it, how it has changed over time. Is that something that you know about?
Aleksic: Well, there’s a bunch of stock phrases that are humorous to people because of their overrepresentation in our culture. And [“mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell” is] funny because obviously it showed up in all these early documentaries, and we started making jokes parodying the fact that it’s so present. Honestly, that’s what brain rot is, too, and if we look at—right now there’s “Dubai chocolate Labubu Crumbl cookie” brain rot, and that’s funny because it’s parodying this overrepresented thing in our culture …
Parshall: Mm-hmm.
Aleksic: And what was “mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell”? Before we had viral algorithmic feeds bringing us the same recommended content over and over again, what would we parody? We’d parody mass culture, and we still are in many ways. But that is a time-honored linguistic process.
Parshall: It’s interesting ’cause it seems distinct from the other phenomenon you mention a lot in the book, which is, like, where something becomes popular because it was actually quite niche, but then, through many particular reasons—maybe it fills a lexical gap or it just sounds funny, like “delulu”—it just gets picked up. Do you think of those as two separate things or maybe two sides of the same coin?
Aleksic: Humans use words because they’re funny or interesting or cool or fit a useful niche. In the case of “mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell,” it’s funny to us, and there’s an underlying social reason for [its] funniness, but no, I don’t think it’s, it’s really fundamentally new. I think maybe because of the highly competitive nature of memes competing with each other in algorithmic environments, we do tend to, like, feel like words seem funnier or there’s more memes driving language than maybe there could’ve been in the past.
But in terms of the stock phrases—I don’t know if you ever took the FitnessGram PACER test.
Parshall: [Laughs and puts on a voice] “The FitnessGram PACER test.”
Aleksic: “The FitnessGram PACER test is a multistage …”
Parshall: Absolutely.
Aleksic: Yeah, exactly …
Parshall: Yeah.
Aleksic: So, like, anybody growing up, like, our sort of age encountered that, and that’s a funny phrase, and I’ve seen FitnessGram PACER test memes on the Internet as well. Memes also call attention to shared realities, shared cultural backgrounds, and it seems niche, it seems like, “Oh, this is this small detail from our childhoods,” and yet it’s—calling back to this niche shared experience feels like you’re part of an in-group, which, at the end of the day, is a repeated thing.
Again, nothing is really that new. It’s the feeling of being in a group that defines how we interact with each other as humans, and that’s something I really try to explore in my book, and that’s something that is common to the mitochondria thing and the FitnessGram thing: it’s calling attention to this very specific thing we all had together.
Parshall: It reminds me a little bit of the day after the SAT, when obviously no one is supposed to be posting SAT memes online, but everyone is posting SAT memes online …
Aleksic: I would love going to the SAT memes subreddit—exactly.
Parshall: It was, like, the most profound feeling of community that I can remember, at least at that point in my life. And you’re so disconnected, you don’t know who these people are, but, yeah, that question did suck, yeah.
Aleksic: The best parts of the Internet are when you feel that collective effervescence because that’s what drives us as humans: this feeling of connection to other people. And social media literally mediates that, but it can make us feel that feeling, get that hit of dopamine, and …
Parshall: Mm.
Parshall: I think people even feel really good saying “Skibidi Toilet sigma rizz,” and I’m curious, one of the things …
Aleksic: That still defines an in-group of people who are in on the joke. I mean, all, all language, at some level, signals your belongingness to a group.
Parshall: I remember when the Oxford [English Dictionary’s publisher, Oxford University Press,] proclaimed 2024 the year of “brain rot,” and I feel like there was a lot of, like, hand-wringing and thinking about, like, “Oh, this is rot.” And, like, even the way we talk about it is, is, like, poking fun at a feeling of malaise that a lot of us have. But I am curious if you can talk a little bit more about why you think people are feeling that—like, people are pointing to that “rot” feeling, but also why you think it’s wrong to think of it as, like, a degradation.
Parshall: I’m gonna review it on Letterboxd.
Aleksic: [Laughs] It’s just, like, what we culturally perceive as, like: “Oh, this is a movie” versus “this is not a movie”; “this is high art” versus “this is low art.” That’s always been culture. That’s, like, our subjective experience in defining what we think is good and bad in society that we only then use to, like, create value judgments on.
I think, like, look at—pop art plays with that boundary between what is low art and what is high art.
Parshall: Mm.
Aleksic: I, I think, if Andy Warhol were around right—today, he would be making, like, Skibidi Toilet paintings.
Parshall: [Laughs]
Aleksic: [Laughs]
Parshall: Oh, it’s an image. That’s an image. I’m picturing the face, yeah.
Parshall: You’re not “sigma”-ing yourself into some sort [laughs] of, like, lower attention span or something. That is just, like, words we’re using to describe something we’re feeling, but the words themselves are not furthering any issue here.
Aleksic: Right.
Parshall: Yeah.
Aleksic: The conversation about algorithmic media and how good or bad it is for our society is a separate—an important conversation to have. But if I’m talking about language in this book, which is the main focus, I really wanna try to separate that and say …
Parshall: Mm-hmm.
Aleksic: “No, it’s not wrong that your middle schooler is saying ‘skibidi.’”
Parshall: I’m sure—I can’t remember what I was saying then, but it was surely …
Aleksic: We were saying all kinds of …
Parshall: No more sensical.
Aleksic: Yeah [laughs].
Parshall: Yeah. I, I am curious about the algorithms. Obviously, the title of the book is Algospeak, and that’s referring to, if I understand correctly, how we change words to get around censorship. There are a few examples from your book that I loved. I’m curious if you have any favorites of—particularly interesting examples of the ways that people have adapted to the algorithms and the censorship to try to change how we speak.
Aleksic: Honestly, my favorite examples really only became mainstream after I finished writing the book. The word “bop,” for example, is now widespread on the Internet to mean “promiscuous woman” but is commonly understood to mean, like, an OnlyFans creator, and to older people it used to mean “oh, a good song.” But because …
Parshall: I didn’t know about this.
Aleksic: No, “bop” is—it means “prostitute”; it means, like, “OnlyFans creator.” And that is widespread how it’s used on algorithmic media. And it’s an incredible example of algospeak …
Parshall: Mm.
Aleksic: Because people don’t even think of it as such. That’s how the creators are using it, but—ask any person in Gen Alpha, and that’s what the word “bop” means to them. And this is perpetuated by influencers and content creators tapping into that engagement treadmill, where they’re trying to go viral by hijacking what is essentially a meme and it is content circumvention at the same time …
Parshall: Mm.
Aleksic: And there’s a viral Bop House of, like—[an] OnlyFans content creator house that [helps] perpetuate the meme further, and individual people will self-identify themselves as a bop.
Parshall: Mm.
Aleksic: And this is just a thing that nobody did, like, a year before, and people don’t even think about it as algospeak, which makes it somehow better at being algospeak.
Parshall: Wow, it’s, like, a double whammy: it’s, like, the algospeak to get around the, like, censorship of saying what you really mean that might get censored, but then also, it feeds into that other thing you mention a lot in the book, which is, like …
Aleksic: Yeah.
Parshall: Turning the keyword into metadata that then feeds the cycle and feeds the virality.
Aleksic: I think that makes it more memetically fit to spread and to stick in our language.
Parshall: You mention, like, “mimetic fitness,” and it reminded me about the ways that we talk about the spread of language [as] being …
Aleksic: Yeah.
Parshall: Like, viral and evolutionary. Do you think …
Aleksic: I’m not a fan of that …
Parshall: Go ahead.
Parshall: Mm-hmm.
Aleksic: In reality this idea does not exist in these sound waves I’m creating …
Parshall: Mm.
Aleksic: It’s [that] you now interpret it through your cultural appraisal, through your unique background and all your associations you have of language and all these words, and you take a slightly different idea out of it, and it can be a similar idea, and we refer to these similar ideas as memes. But memes only maybe compete inside an—any one individual’s head …
Parshall: Hmm.
Aleksic: You feel like you like a word better than some other thing. But it’s not competing in the wild; there’s no idea space where these memes are fighting against each other. But we have to use that metaphor because it’s super difficult and hard to say, “I have a feeling about something, and I physically alter the universe, and then you uptake your own feeling out of it, and there’s aggregate feelings of how feelings occur.” [Laughs] Not very useful. But yeah, sorry I had to really put a disclaimer on the viral metaphor, which I think …
Parshall: Yeah.
Aleksic: Is a real hindrance to the field of mimetics, which is, I think, a very important thing to be looking at, but the metaphor of [language] “going viral”—literally a virus—is problematic.
Parshall: One of the things that stuck out to me a lot in the book was just this breakneck pace of how fast things are evolving right now. Labubus were popular for, like—I mean, this isn’t really a word, but then the meme—the word itself does become a meme. But now I feel like Labubus are over, because I feel like people got onto it …
Aleksic: Yeah.
Parshall: And it’s done now. And I—if I took one week off of social media, I probably could have missed almost all of the Labubus. When you think about how breakneck the pace is, what are you thinking of the consequences of that, compared to what we used to do, which is, like, “on fleek” is popular for months?
Aleksic: Yeah, well, on one hand that just means we have to be more responsive as creators and as consumers of content to be tapped into the algorithmic trend, which helps these platforms. I do think, now, if we are going back to the cultural angle and not the linguistic angle ’cause linguistically, it’s—this is just really cool that there’s new words coming and [these are] new ways for humans to express themselves and this is fun to study for me. Culturally, I am a little concerned, perhaps, that—there’s two types of communication, really; Harold Innis, in his book The Bias of Communication, breaks this down. But there’s space-biased and time-biased communication. Time-biased will last longer across time, and space will just take up a lot of space right now but turn over quickly. So, like, news cycles versus a book: [a book] will stay longer, but a news cycle will reach more people. And viral communication reaches a lot of people really quickly, but it doesn’t last long …
Parshall: Mm.
Aleksic: Like an oral tradition or something.
And the difference is, like, these oral traditions, these more time-biased forms of media, are ritualistic. They’re meant to build community. The root of the word “communication” comes from the same root as “community” because that’s what the original purpose was: building community. And I worry that the surplus of this space-biased communication, which is just filling up [space]—it’s, like, the word “content” literally means it’s something that just fills up space. And I’m worried that means we have less connection to one another, perhaps, through a “media study is cultural theory” angle. Linguistically, again, it’s just fun that we have new words.
Parshall: Yeah. Do you get excited every time there’s a new word, like, or …
Aleksic: Totally, I mean, it’s just—well, it’s good for me that I stay in business [laughs]. It’s definitely good …
Parshall: Another long day at the word factory.
Aleksic: [Laughs] Yeah, a linguist be like, “I have a word due at midnight.” No, it’s, it’s, it’s a lot of fun, and it’s especially rewarding to see that this framework I outline in Algospeak continues applying to new situations. I talk about some words that are already clearly outdated; I mean, if “Labubu” is outdated already, “skibidi” sure as heck is. But, like, it’s not the words themselves that—I use them to paint this picture of [the fact that] the algorithmic infrastructure underlying language evolution is here to stay and it’s going to keep affecting words in this way that I’m discussing. We see that with the word “bop” emerging now. We see this with new trends of brain rot. The iterations are following the same patterns, which is—and in many ways the same patterns that humans have always relied on to communicate with one another …
Parshall: Mm.
Aleksic: But shaped uniquely by this new medium and its constraints and its advantages.
Parshall: One of those constraints or advantages or whatever that stuck out to me a lot as seeming pretty important is the “context collapse” one, where, like, basically, we never know who we’re talking to or who is talking to us. Can you tell me a little bit more about the ways that ends up impacting the words we use and how we feel about them?
Aleksic: Yeah, context collapse means you perceive something in a new context, right, and you don’t know where it came from originally. And that means, practically, you lose the power that those words originally had. Let’s look at African American English. A lot of words that we use today—slay, serve, queen, ate, yass, bet—[a] lot of these come from the ballroom scene in New York City in the 1980s, which was this queer, Black, Latino space. And there’d be, like, a regulatory function: if you were a, a white girl saying “slay” in the 1980s, it’d be, like, strange; people would look at you funny.
There’s none of that because the context is different. So what would happen on social media is people feel like they’re speaking to one audience, the algorithm’s gonna intercept that and distribute it to another audience [because] that’ll just make more money for the algorithm. And that’s where the context collapses. Now you’re a white girl looking at a mother in a ball house say the word “slay,” and you feel like, “Oh, this person’s talking to me. It’s on my For You page; it must be for me.” And you interpret that, and then you now make a video saying “slay,” and then now, only one degree removed, now we have a white girl saying “slay,” and this is viewed by other white girls—maybe your video goes more viral—and context collapses. Nobody even knows that it came from, like, the ballroom scene ever because it just comes …
Parshall: Mm.
Aleksic: Directly from the mouthpiece of the white girl saying “slay.”
Parshall: Mm. Do you feel any particular type of way about this? English being a lingua franca, where it’s, like, on the one hand connecting more people; on the other hand many languages are dying or being neglected, and that’s awful. It’s this double-edged sword, maybe there’s no way to fully reconcile it, but it seems like on the one hand, oh, connecting so many people with cultures they wouldn’t have seen before, and on the other, like, a dilution of what those cultures want to be when they’re separate.
Aleksic: Yeah, well, the way I reconcile it is I think we should just make as many people as aware as possible of what’s happening. It’s not my job as a linguist to tell you, “This is what you’re gonna say; this is what you’re not gonna say.” It’s my job to, like, publicly observe these changes that are occurring, and you make your own judgments. Again, separating the language and culture, but the culture is always there—it’s intertwined. You should make your own conclusions about what you wanna say. I certainly say or don’t say certain words based on my value judgments of how much I like saying those words. I think that’s reasonable; you have to do that. And I think everybody should be more informed about language so we can be more conscientious as communicators.
Parshall: I wanna wrap it up, but I, also, I think maybe a good place to, to do that would be to ask a little bit more about one of the sentences that you have toward the end of the book, which you said, “We live with the algorithm, but our resistance to it is embedded in our counterculture.” I’m curious if you can tell me a little bit more about how you see us resisting the algorithm or maybe how you feel like you try to resist the algorithm. How do we live with this?
Parshall: Mm.
Parshall: Mm.
Aleksic: [The meme genre of] brain rot is poking fun at algorithmic oversaturation. A lot of our expression is a subtle resistance because language is never just one thing at a time. I’m not just saying words; I’m saying words in the context in which I’m saying words, and the context is through the algorithm. So if I’m an influencer trying to communicate to you right now, maybe I want to recognize, on some level, that I am forced to do so.
Parshall: Get meta with it a little.
Aleksic: I try to in my videos.
Parshall: [Laughs] Yeah, I think that works. Our creativity, like you said, knows no bounds, and it’s interesting that some linguistic contexts really allow for that, but it seems like we’ll find a way.
Aleksic: I also think we’re always gonna stay ahead of the large language models. They’re always trying to catch up to what humans are saying. But you ask ChatGPT to generate slang words, and it’s gonna sound stilted …
Parshall: Mm.
Aleksic: Because it’s devoid of context. Humans are always a step ahead because what these algorithms have is a map of language, not the territory of language, and the territory is constantly evolving and pushing past new boundaries.
Parshall: Hmm, like you—what you were mentioning earlier, I was thinking about: the, like, your head to my head. It doesn’t exist outside of your head to my head. And I think one of the reasons why I feel so unsettled looking at, like, ChatGPT-written writing is it’s pretending to exist outside of the head, but it’s not.
Aleksic: Yeah, that’s just a bunch of numbers that are predicting a response that you wanna see that are mirroring your mannerisms. Yeah [laughs], it’s weird.
Parshall: Well, I feel so, like, simultaneously fond and [have], like, love for Internet culture and what I always—I alternate between “I’m not gonna go on TikTok at all this week” to “I wanna be on TikTok as much as possible because I wanna feel like I’m part of it,” and I don’t know if you have a way that you’ve come to reconcile those emotions …
Aleksic: No, that’s the paradox, I think, central to interacting with the Internet, right? It’s the best way to be tapped into the culture. I think it’s our moral duty to responsibly interact with culture and be aware of how, how, you know, the algorithm’s shaping us. But I think ignoring the algorithm altogether seems sort of bad because then you can be quickly blindsided by sudden cultural or political shifts. You, you should be aware of what’s happening, and you should be generally, yeah, aware of things in general.
So I think it’s, it’s okay to interact with the algorithm responsibly, but again, I come back to that idea that we should be as aware as possible. I personally, yeah, I doomscroll [laughs] a little bit, but then I set my own boundaries. Like, I, I set my phone in another room when I go to bed, and I read a little bit, and that’s a really good boundary for me because now I’m able to still have my doomscrolling time in the morning or whatever, but now I can accomplish something or feel like I’m mixing forms of media or not just consuming one form of media or being controlled by the media. All of that seems important simultaneously.
Parshall: It’s fascinating to me how we’re all kind of feeling through the dark of navigating our own relationship with healthy boundaries for social media on our own, and it seems—I don’t know, it seems like we’re all, like, sitting around an AA meeting, like, trying to figure out how to make it work for us, but …
Parshall: At the very least I don’t wanna be caught off guard when my little cousin says the next version of “skibidi.” [Laughs] I don’t wanna look not cool.
Aleksic: Exactly, exactly.
Parshall: Yes.
Aleksic: Well, you’re gonna look not cool no matter what …
Parshall: I know. We do …
Aleksic: That’s, that’s—our job is to look uncool, yeah.
Parshall: You have to make peace with that.
Feltman: That’s all for today’s episode. We’ll be back on Monday with our weekly news roundup.
For Scientific American, this is Rachel Feltman. Have a great weekend!
Rachel Feltman is former executive editor of Popular Science and forever host of the podcast The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week. She previously founded the blog Speaking of Science for the Washington Post.
Allison Parshall is an associate editor at Scientific American covering mind and brain and she writes the weekly online Science Quizzes. As a multimedia journalist, she contributes to Scientific American‘s podcast Science Quickly. Parshall’s work has also appeared in Quanta Magazine and Inverse. She graduated from New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute with a master’s degree in science, health and environmental reporting. She has a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Georgetown University.
Jeffery DelViscio is currently chief multimedia editor/executive producer at Scientific American. He is former director of multimedia at STAT, where he oversaw all visual, audio and interactive journalism. Before that he spent more than eight years at the New York Times, where he worked on five different desks across the paper. He holds dual master’s degrees in journalism and in Earth and environmental sciences from Columbia University. He has worked onboard oceanographic research vessels and tracked money and politics in science from Washington, D.C. He was a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2018. His work has won numerous awards, including two News and Documentary Emmy Awards.
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