{"id":17839,"date":"2025-07-17T16:49:38","date_gmt":"2025-07-17T20:49:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/languagehat.com\/?p=17839"},"modified":"2025-07-17T16:49:38","modified_gmt":"2025-07-17T20:49:38","slug":"etymology-nerd","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/languagehat.com\/etymology-nerd\/","title":{"rendered":"Etymology Nerd."},"content":{"rendered":"

Callie Holtermann writes for the NY Times<\/em><\/a> (archived<\/a>) about a linguist who posts online as Etymology Nerd and who was mentioned here last year<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Adam Aleksic has been thinking about seggs. Not sex, but seggs \u2014 a substitute term that took off a few years ago among those trying to dodge content-moderation restrictions on TikTok. Influencers shared stories from their \u201cseggs lives\u201d and spoke about the importance of \u201cseggs education.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lots of similarly inventive workarounds have emerged to discuss sensitive or suggestive topics online. This phenomenon is called algospeak, and it has yielded terms like \u201ccornucopia\u201d for homophobia and \u201cunalive,\u201d a euphemism for suicide that has made its way into middle schoolers\u2019 offline vocabulary.<\/p>\n

These words roll off the tongue for Mr. Aleksic, a 24-year-old linguist and content creator who posts as Etymology Nerd on social media. Others may find them slightly bewildering. But, as he argues in a new book, \u201cAlgospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language,\u201d these distinctly 21st-century coinages are worthy of consideration by anyone interested in the forces that mold our shifting lexicon.
\n[…]<\/p>\n

Mr. Aleksic has been dissecting slang associated with Gen Z on social media since 2023. In wobbly, breathless videos that are usually about a minute long, he uses his undergraduate degree in linguistics from Harvard to explain the spread of terms including \u201clowkey\u201d and \u201cgyat.\u201d (If you must know, the latter is a synonym for butt.)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There’s much more at the link, including a discussion of \u201crizz\u201d (which we talked about in 2023<\/a>); I was curious about the odd-looking \u201cgyat\u201d and googled, but I’m not convinced by the etymology given here<\/a>: “Girl Your Ass Is Thick.” <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Callie Holtermann writes for the NY Times (archived) about a linguist who posts online as Etymology Nerd and who was mentioned here last year: Adam Aleksic has been thinking about seggs. Not sex, but seggs \u2014 a substitute term that took off a few years ago among those trying to dodge content-moderation restrictions on TikTok. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17839","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagehat.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17839","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagehat.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagehat.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagehat.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagehat.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17839"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/languagehat.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17839\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17840,"href":"https:\/\/languagehat.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17839\/revisions\/17840"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagehat.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17839"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagehat.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17839"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagehat.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17839"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}