Social Media and the English Language #TotesChanging

by Nick Persad

Who doesn’t love a nonsensical word or expression?

Whether it be What’s your damage?, the popular ’80s phrase used to show annoyance with your friends; da bomb!, the go-to expression for ’90s kids used to describe anything cool; or bro hug, a term the current generation coined for when two guys warmly embrace, society loves creating new language to heighten its expressiveness.

Most times, when I need to exclaim how much I have enjoyed something (eating at a new restaurant, going to a concert, getting a tattoo) saying, “It was totes-magotes amazing!” just feels far more appropriate than “It was great!”

While some may cringe at the very idea of verbalizing these terms, they have quickly and effectively wormed their way into our everyday speech. Even if you don’t personally use such terms, you are almost guaranteed to enter a conversation where they will be uttered—probably with much enthusiasm.

But how do these words and phrases become part of our normal dialogue? What factors contribute to them becoming globally recognizable—to the point where they are inducted into the Oxford online dictionary as part of the English language?

First, let’s take a look at some of the words making the cut this year in the Oxford online dictionary:

• catfish: to lure someone into a relationship by a adopting a fictional online persona
• cray: crazy
• selfie: a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and shared via social media
• side-eye: a sidelong glance expressing disapproval or contempt

Unlike the generations of the ’80s and ’90s, which lacked the technologically advanced resources and devices that are prevalent in the 2010s, the current generation is swamped with social media platforms—Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, Vine—encouraging them to reiterate the latest lingo. Interestingly, the majority of these terms simply exaggerate forms of different emotion[AVT1] s (much like totes-magotes is a way of saying “really, really, really….”)

According to Jon Reed for the OxfordWords blog, “The words that surround us every day influence the words we use. Since so much of the written language we see is now on the screens of our computers, tablets and smartphones, language now evolves partly through our interaction with technology. And because the language we use to communicate with each other tends to be more malleable than formal writing, the combination of informal, personal communication and the mass audience afforded by social media is a recipe for rapid change.”

Undoubtedly, technology is the primary factor in these terms becoming known across the nation and even around the world. From the use of the hashtag (e.g., #ThrowbackThursday) in every tweet or post to Instagram and Tumblr, to abbreviations like ICYMI (“in case you missed it”) and YOLO (“you only live once”), these new words and phrases have entered the English language to the point of essentially becoming acceptable for informal usage. Future generations may come to know these terms as regular, common words in the English language. The debate over whether that’s a benefit for the language has attracted polarizing views, but it shows that English continually evolves over time. And while many cite the internet as a catalyst for the speed of this change, it is important to note that the internet is also the reason we notice these changes so quickly. Websites are collecting written records of language faster than verbal phrases could have ever been cataloged.

A quote by C. W. Anderson, a professor of media culture at the City University of New York (CUNY), for a New York Times article sums it up best: “The internet is everywhere, but it has its own regional vernacular. And those expressions move into standardized language. That process is occurring—like everything else—far more quickly. What’s different now is that it’s being transcribed and written down.”

Did You Know?

Use of words and phrases like bro hug and selfie have skyrocketed due to their strong use in social media. But which platforms are having the greatest effects? In order to determine the most popular posts and articles being shared on the interwebs, the website Marketing Land found “the 1 million most-shared articles on social media from the top 190 publishers, and the number of shares they generated during the first half of 2014.” Once they compiled this list, they applied AlchemyAPI’s Sentiment Analysis API (application programming interface), which provides “multiple modes of sentiment analysis . . . for a variety of use cases ranging from social media monitoring to trend analysis.” The study yielded that Facebook produced 81.9 percent of the shares, while the remaining was a combination of Twitter, Google+, Pinterest and LinkedIn. Additionally, the publisher with the most shares was BuzzFeed, claiming 408 million shares that accounted for “6 percent of the 2.6 billion shares generated by the million articles in this study.”