this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2024
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me_irl
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The only thing I would disagree on is that lingo is a recent phenomenon. That's just recency bias.
The Catholic Church used Latin at mass from its inception to the mid-20th century, and the oldest Greek versions of the Bible already use some words we simply have never seen anywhere else.
Philosophers have always been a notorious PITA with using existing words or close derivatives of existing words with different meanings, sometimes the lingo is specific to a single author.
And let's not even get into judicial lingo and its very ancient and storied use of disenfranchising the less fortunate who did not speak it and could not afford a lawyer to speak it for them - that is when the court system wasn't in Latin.
Corporate lingo takes more room in our lives as large corporations take up more and more of the economic and political landscape (with some interesting evolutions in form thanks to the influence of Globish). That's it.
Ever-changing lingo is almost certainly a recent phenomenon, as the pace and frequency of communication has changed drastically recently.
It's difficult to get a new buzzword to float to a massive audience without mass communication. More recently, the president can invent a new buzzword (e.g. one I remember viscerally is "WMD"s which I swear I had never heard before the run-up to the Iraq war) and have social media, mass media, and individual people saying it in under a week.
I also think this is partly why "Gen Z speak" sounds so strange to my ear. When I heard "rizz" I knew without looking it up that it was invented and dispersed in online circles. Sure, there have been other generations with their own lingo, but other generations didn't cook up country-wide or even worldwide lingo that can be directly attributed to one YouTube personality or another. Growing up I very, very rarely heard people using online subculture speak (e.g. l33t sp34k) in real life because we all knew it would sound fucking stupid.
You're just getting old. Things have perhaps gotten a little faster in general, but Gen Z didn't invent slang. Also "skibbidy rizz" is Gen Alpha more than Z. And slang very rarely is attributable to a single personality. Apparently Kai Cenat popularized "rizz", but it had existed for a long time before and has way outgrown him. The vast majority of people who unironically say "rizz" don't even know who he is.
The linguistic phenomenon isn't even linked to the internet particularly. It's just a contraction of "charisma", hardly an unusual way for slang to emerge pre-internet and not comparable to 1337 5p34k which never made it out of terminally online subcultures.
Before the internet, radio, TV, and the press were effective tools for massively spreading slang. Boomers had no issues making "cool" cool, as well as a bunch of other slang words that unlike "cool" aren't cool anymore.
Your generation had "WMDs" but I'm sure boomers had similar things with Vietnam, and their parents with WWII. Hell, in 1918 or so the entire world learned the phrase "Spanish flu" like we did "COVID". The more things change the more they stay the same.
And how can we forget "OK" whose origins are mysterious but generally people agree it comes from a short lived 19th century linguistic fad that gave "Oll Korrect" (what's for sure is that "okay" came after "OK"). Now "OK" is quite possibly the most universal word in existence. Sure back then it probably took a few years to spread within the anglosphere, but OTOH there was also much more dialectic variability in language across regions so it's not like there was less going on, it was just more fragmented.
People have always been going crazy with language and each generation appropriates their mother tongue in their unique way. The idea that language is even remotely static or "used to be less crazy" is entirely false, yet every generation perpetuates this idea when confronted with new slang they don't understand.
Yeah the same is true for me and you and everyone else. But the rate of change of lingo has increased because the power that used to belong to only people with direct access to mass media now belongs to anyone who has or had a "viral" moment.
That's exactly the point. Of course language isn't static and wasn't static ever, but the ability for lingo to spread and become mainstream has increased with the ability to reach new audiences provided by new forms of mass media (termed as social media).