The Linguistics of Brain Rot

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.

Go beyond the episode:

• Adam Aleksic’s Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language
• Follow @EtymologyNerd on Instagram or TikTok
• Listen to our interviews with Gretchen McCulloch on how the internet changed language and Don Kulick on how a language dies
• For two different takes on how the kids these days are handling social media, watch Adolescence (fiction) and/or Social Studies (documentary)

Tune in every (other) week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek and sponsored by the Phi Beta Kappa Society.

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