can you own a word?
how the creator economy is changing our ideas about intellectual property
In 2014, Kayla Newman found herself in an unprecedented legal situation.
Posting content as @peachesmonroee, the young creator had finally made it big. Her most recent vlog, in which she coined the phrase on fleek to describe her new eyebrows, was going incredibly viral on Vine. Ariana Grande and Kim Kardashian were using the phrase on social media. Forever21 and H&M were selling on fleek merchandise. Nicki Minaj rapped about being pretty on fleek in a new song, and then publicly feuded with another celebrity who started selling pretty on fleek t-shirts.
Kayla never saw a cent of profit.
And why should she? You can’t own a word. Sure, you can register a trademark, but only to identify a product or service—and Kayla had none. Rather, the word had just become a part of language like any other, free for anyone to use without attribution.1
Fast forward to the summer of 2024, and everything is different. TikTok creator Jools Lebron goes viral for her videos about being very demure, mindful, and cutesy, but this time she’s getting the kind of recognition Kayla never had. She goes on Jimmy Kimmel Live. She makes enough money to pay for her gender-affirming surgery. Thousands of people credit her as they participate in her trend. The intellectual property process remains difficult as ever—Jools is currently fighting to trademark the phrases—but she’s been universally celebrated as a “word creator” in a way that Kayla Newman never was.
What changed?
Social media has obviously undergone some major shifts over the past ten years. Since 2014, we’ve seen the creator economy grow from peanuts to an over 250-billion-dollar industry. Online personalities have grown more influential, and we’re placing greater respect and awareness on creators in our cultural consciousness.
At the same time, our attitude toward online trends has shifted: we’re more aware of their origins than we have ever been. I identify the turning point as Charli D’Amelio’s rendition of the “Renegade” dance in 2019, which she performed without credit to its choreographer, 14-year-old Jalaiah Harmon from Atlanta, Georgia. After the resulting backlash, D’Amelio eventually apologized, and it became a new norm to acknowledge the originator of an online trend.
This concept has clearly been extended to words, which means that something important has changed in our public conception of word ownership. New phrases don’t simply spring into being; they come from someone who possesses the idea of that language. We even bring this attitude to meme words like gyat, rizz, and huzz, which are fairly widely recognized to have been popularized by Twitch streamer Kai Cenat.
I talk a lot on here about how social media is changing language, but language doesn’t exist in isolation. Rather, it exists in context of our cultural attitudes, which are constantly changing. Now that we’re giving creators more power for their work, we’re also treating words with greater scrutiny.
The connection between “demure” and TikTok dances since the “Renegade” also shows that we’re rightfully starting to perceive words as trends. Just like any other viral meme, slang is now frequently introduced through the creativity of social media influencers before being adopted by other creators and taking our culture by storm.2 It’s good that we’re starting to recognize that.
Kayla eventually did end up trademarking fleek for a cosmetics company, but not until several years after the fleek fad died out.
And usually dying out shortly after: when slang words are tied to memes, they’re also tied to meme lifespans—eventually getting unfunny and discarded.
I'm not sure you can truly claim ownership of a word, but you can certainly claim to have started a trend which uses a word, though whether we should consider that ownership I'm not particularly sure either.
I think a very important part of this equation is racialised, in that the transference of words across racial lines is becoming more common due to Tiktok specifically but more ambiently, the virtual melting pot of the internet. New phrases do not spring into being but pretty much all of the words that you've mentioned are used and/or popularised by Black youth because Black cultural production is seen as cool and edgy by the dominant culture (when it isn't being seen as vulgar or offensive) and there is an element of spectacle that becomes attached to them.
This is why the question of "owning a word" is complex. I consider this with the word "woke". Woke was a word that was appropriated across racial lines with a very specific slipstream of transference. White queerness adopts (or appropriates) the word through close proximity to Blackness, the word then becomes a blanket term for "social justice", a concept that is heavily scrutinised by the white right wing already and finally, in its stage now, it has begun to mutate as a word that has a negative connotation, akin to "insufferably virtual signalling" with a twinge of dog whistle within it.
Ownership of words presents differently to the Black demographic because ownership exists differently when you occupy Blackness. The exploitation of "on fleek" was lubricated, perhaps, not by the idea that "words cannot be owned thus we'll do whatever we want with this word" but more subconsciously as "nothing belongs to Blackness" which is obviously an impossible thought process to quantify yet one that Black people must contend with all the same, in ways we cannot ever predict. When Kayla posted her "on fleek" video, she had no idea that so many people would profit off from it–she was just existing how she exists. It is no coincidence that the two examples of eschewing credit both involve Black people.
Perhaps the question of "can you own a word?" becomes arbitrary when you actually look at the cogs involved, as it reduces and circumnavigates a core mechanism of the issue: how whiteness will lean towards exploitation when Blackness is involved. So perhaps, it is a question of, what is the proper way for the dominant culture to interact with productions–words, dances, etc–when they are not part of that culture, and furthermore, what is the best conduct - full stop?