how to kill a word

i'm feeling etymologically murderous

Last week, I was interviewed by the New York Times for an article on the word “slop,” which is currently emerging in the tech community to describe low-quality AI-generated content. It has all the markings of a word that could really take off in mainstream English, with one tiny problem: the article itself will probably affect the word’s success.

On one hand, a prominent news piece could catapult “slop” into the public consciousness. People might realize that they need a word for the increasingly prevalent phenomenon and turn to the article’s proffered option over other emerging alternatives. On the other hand, it could stop the word in its tracks by making it seem forced. Nobody wants to feel like a new term is being shoved down their throats; we instead prefer to naturally adopt it.

The best example for this was a 2021 New York Times article on the word “cheugy,” which at the time was minorly trending among younger creators on TikTok as a synonym of “unfashionable” or “outdated.” Once the article was published, however, the story was sensationalized and misinterpreted by dozens of clickbait websites claiming that Gen Z was using the word to insult Millennials. The resulting kerfuffle alienated the young people who hadn’t yet adopted the word, killing any chance of “cheugy” becoming truly widespread.¹

The problem with the “cheugy” article is that it drew too much attention to the word. Slang spreads best when it’s unobtrusive—when it’s not noticeable. Obvious, or obtrusive slang words, don’t work because they feel unnatural.² That’s why Gretchen couldn’t make “fetch” happen in Mean Girls, and that’s why the New York Times killed “cheugy.”

I call this phenomenon the “Linguistic Observer Effect.” In physics, the act of observation disturbs a system, and the same is true in linguistics. Words, like particles, exist in a complex environment with a lot of moving pieces. Publicly disturbing that environment with an article can change the course of a word’s trajectory, just like observing an electron will alter its velocity and momentum. This is especially true for vulnerably nascent words like “slop” or “cheugy.”

In April, I made a video predicting that the word “gagged” will become a mainstream replacement for “slay.” To my surprise, the video got more than nine million views across social media platforms. While I don’t think I caused any massive shift in the word’s popularity, I sometimes wonder if my video made a small butterfly-effect dent in its ultimate trajectory. I guess we’ll never know for sure; words are, after all, famously difficult to observe.

1. The Wikipedia List of Gen Z Slang still cites “cheugy” as a Gen Z word, even though nobody I know actually uses it.

2. For more, read Metcalf, Allan (2004). Predicting New Words: The Secrets of Their Success. United States: Houghton Mifflin.