What's with all this new language?

By Austin Blair, 2024

Published 11/30/2023

At first glance, ‘fanum tax’ might seem like antiquated legal jargon for some obscure form of taxation. In reality, the term was coined in late 2022 to describe when someone snatches a bit of your food. You may be asking yourself: Huh? Why is this something that people are saying? In fact, why have all of these weird and wacky words and phrases — from rizz to sigma — suddenly become common vernacular? Well, influential streamers aside, there are some underlying trends behind this fascinating and somewhat alarming phenomenon.

Before the Internet took over modern life, people relied on slower, more formal types of media (from newspapers to TV) to receive information. This not only impeded the rate at which information was processed, but also the rate at which new language was acquired. However, as the Internet grew rapidly in the 1990s and 2000s, a faster and less formal type of media, social media, began to enable neologisms to quickly form and spread throughout the online space. Messages could be transmitted instantly, by anyone, and without much pressure to conform to a set of verbal conventions. As people became more loose with their language — as seen in texting etiquette — this carried over into the creation and use of new terms and phrases. Given that young people have historically been the purveyors of new language, it helped that social media allowed for the formation of niche online communities where their creativity could be put on full display. For instance, 21-year-old Kai Cenat has amassed a following of nearly 8 million on the streaming platform Twitch, and he has been responsible for the explosive growth of many terms — including ‘rizz’ and ‘fanum tax’ — that we see today.

Altogether, the fast and loose online environment has been the perfect breeding ground for new elements of culture, from memes to language. However, just as with memes of yore, language comes and goes, and we can never be too certain that the words we say today will still be said tomorrow. We can only hope that the skibidi toilet of time will not flush away the memories of the times we had saying them.