Adam Aleksic has been thinking about seggs. Not sex, but seggs — 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 “seggs lives” and spoke about the importance of “seggs education”.

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 “cornucopia” for homophobia and “unalive”, a euphemism for suicide that has made its way into middle schoolers’ offline vocabulary.

These words roll off the tongue for 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, Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language, these distinctly 21st-century coinages are worthy of consideration by anyone interested in the forces that mould our shifting lexicon.

“The more I looked into it, the more I realised that algorithms are really affecting every aspect of modern language change,” Aleksic said in a recent interview, padding around the apartment he shares with a roommate Manhattan, New York, US, wearing socks stitched with tiny dolphins.

Even those who steer clear of social media are not exempt. If you have encountered Oxford University Press’s 2024 word of the year, “brain rot”, you, too, have had a brush with social media’s ability to incubate slang and catapult it into the offline world.

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 University, US, to explain the spread of terms including “lowkey” and “gyat”. (If you must know, the latter is a synonym for butt.)

The videos are more rigorous than their informal quality might suggest. Each one takes four or five hours to compose, he said. He scripts every word and combs Google Scholar for relevant papers from academic journals that he can cite in screenshots.

He appears to be fashioning himself as Bill Nye for Gen Z language enthusiasts. In the process, he has become a go-to voice for journalists and anyone older than 30 who might want to understand why Skibidi Toilet, the nonsensical name of a YouTube series, has wormed its way into Gen Alpha’s vocabulary.

In person, he is animated but not frenetic. He started speeding up his cadence when he realised that brisk videos tended to get more views. “I’ll retake a video if I don’t think I spoke fast enough,” he said.

Just as Aleksic changed the way he spoke in response to algorithmic pressure, language, too, can be bent by users seeking an audience on social media.

Take “rizz”, which means something along the lines of charisma. According to Aleksic, the word was popularised by Twitch streamer Kai Cenat, whose young fans picked up the term. So did the robust ecosystem of people online who make fun of Cenat’s every move. Soon, the word had been flagged by TikTok’s recommendation algorithm as a trending topic that it could highlight to keep viewers engaged. Influencers — including Aleksic — who wanted their posts to be pushed to more viewers now had an incentive to join in.

This process slingshots trendy coinages into the broader consciousness. But it also yanks terms from their original context faster than ever before, he said. Words with origins in African American English or ballroom culture, for instance, are often mislabelled as “Gen Z slang” or “Internet slang”.

Words have always travelled from insular communities into wider usage: Aleksic likes the example of “OK”, which was Boston newspaper slang in the 19th century that spread with the help of Martin Van Buren’s reelection campaign.

But “delulu” and “rizz” didn’t need the eighth US president’s help to travel across the country — they had the Internet. And TikTok’s powerful algorithm is more efficient at getting the word out than the most overachieving press secretary.

Today, the cycle of word generation has been turbocharged to the point that some of its output hardly makes sense. Nowhere is that more evident than in a chapter titled “Sticking Out Your Gyat for the Rizzler”, a chaotic mélange of slang that is hilarious to middle schoolers precisely because it is so illegible to adults. Words and phrases don’t need to be understood to go viral — they just have to be funny enough to retain our attention.

Aleksic argues that “algospeak” is no longer as simple as swapping sex for “seggs”; it is a linguistic ecosystem in which words rocket from the margins to the mainstream in a matter of days, and sometimes fade just as fast. When influencers modify their vocabulary and speech patterns for maximum visibility, those patterns are reinforced among their audiences.

Aleksic said he works hard to keep viewers’ attention, for example, jumping between camera angles roughly every eight seconds. He longed for a forum in which he could discuss his ideas at length, and last January, he began refining an idea for a book about algorithms and language.

That’s an ambitious goal for a recent college graduate without an advanced degree or decades of research experience.

NYTNS