Podcast

Inside the Viral Words That Make You Click - Etymology Nerd -

Modern Wisdom

Last highlighted April 19, 2026 Source ↗ ← All highlights

Why 6-7 Still Means Something
- Adam Aleksic argues absurd viral terms still carry meaning because their absurdity comments on the attention economy itself.
- He calls 6-7 a meta word and a knowing wink that cashes in on clip farming and virality. Transcript: Chris Williamson 6-7 was voted word of the year in 2025 from dictionary.com. Is that cheating? Not even a word. Doesn’t mean anything. Adam Aleksic Well, you have to understand that whenever a dictionary chooses their word of the year, that’s a marketing ploy by Big Dictionary to sell more dictionaries. Yes. 6-7, of course, is this reference where if you say it, you can go viral. That’s the idea behind 6-7. That’s the whole joke that this is a possibility of getting clipped that you can cash in on the virality of it for your own game. And dictionary.com played that game. But every single person who did it also cashed in on that. There was a Connecticut House Representative, Bill Buckby, who said 6-7 on the Connecticut state floor. And all these people are doing the exact same thing as Taylan Kinney, who is the basketball player who started the trend, and all the Gen Alpha kids who are cashing in on it, like the 6’7 Kid. All of it was a ploy for virality. And it is a realization that clip farming is the future of distribution online. Chris Williamson Wow. Okay. But it’s a word that doesn’t mean anything and is specifically designed to be vacuous and to incite the question, what does that mean? Adam Aleksic Is that unique? I don’t believe that it doesn’t mean anything. I believe even when something is absurd, absurdity is a meaning. And it’s absurd for a reason. It’s absurd because it’s sort of critiquing the general information ecosystem. It’s absurd that this would emerge as a word, but that is the meaning. The absurdity of the word is its own definition. Ah, okay. Chris Williamson So it’s a story about, it’s a meta word. Yeah, exactly. Adam Aleksic It’s a knowing wink. By uttering 6-7, you’re playing into the panopticon. Chris Williamson Rage bait was Oxford’s 2025 word of the year. Right. Adam Aleksic They’re also, they’re rage baiting with that. They’re hoping that it sparks controversy. (Time 0:00:00)
TikTok Became The Dominant Slang Machine
- TikTok now functions as the strongest engine of slang creation because its interface makes users feel inside a live conversation.
- Adam Aleksic says platforms create house-like dialects, with LinkedIn, Twitter, TikTok, and fandom groups each shaping different speech norms. Transcript: Chris Williamson Do you think is TikTok becoming the most powerful linguistic engine on Earth at the moment? Is that what’s shaping language more than anything else? Absolutely. Adam Aleksic There was a study by Know Your Meme in 2022 that found where words come from over time by percentage of platforms. And it started out mostly on 4chan and Reddit and Twitter. And now it’s mostly TikTok and Twitter. And again, sorry, X. It’s still Twitter. I know. It’s still Twitter. I’m holding on to it. Yeah. Yeah, no, but a lot of stuff is happening in TikTok. There’s linguistic innovation. There’s a kind of everything comes from the user interface. There’s a feeling of a conversation happening there. Users come there for the conversation to chip in, to be part of this effervescent thing that’s going on. And in that language is created. Along with this, we have all these echo chambers and algorithmic trends being perpetuated that push modern slang cycles faster than ever before. Chris Williamson Is there such a thing as a Twitter dialect versus a LinkedIn dialect versus a Reddit or a live stream dialect? Are these almost individual variants on language in each of these different cohorts? Absolutely. Adam Aleksic It’s the same way when you’re in your grandmother’s house versus when you’re in a frat house, you have a different expectation of how to speak. You’re not going to speak to your grandmother the way you would to a frat brother. There’s like a normal way of communicating. So a platform functions kind of like a house. It is a place where you go to use a certain type of language. So on LinkedIn, you’re going to use this more professional language. On Twitter, you’re going to engage in more linguistic play where you have all these words like jester gooning or whatever emerge. On TikTok, there might be more fandom language or something. But also, I don’t want to speak broadly about individual platforms. Even within these platforms, there are micro dialects going on. (Time 0:02:31)
Why Influencers Stretch Words Online
- Influencer accents are optimized for identity and retention, not just self-expression.
- Adam Aleksic says uptalk and dragged final syllables work as floor holding, signaling I’m not done speaking so viewers keep listening. Transcript: Chris Williamson What are the most defining characteristics of influencers speaking online for creators? How do you think about the constituent components of that? Adam Aleksic Yeah. I’ve spent a lot of time working on the influencer accent. I used to consult on a court case where one influencer was suing another influencer for stealing her vibe. And part of that was the accent. Chris Williamson Hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on. Adam Aleksic Pause. Chris Williamson What? Adam Aleksic It was here in Austin, actually. But there was one is called the sad beige lawsuit that there was this minimalist influencer kind of wore a lot of brown clothing. And there was another minimalist influencer also in Austin who wore a lot of brown clothing. And they kind of spoke the same. And so one of them sued the other for stealing their IP. The accent. Exactly. So I was brought on as a consultant in that case. And the takeaway is that neither of them were really original and that they pay homage to an older tradition of influencers talking. It’s a long and illustrious history of influencers speaking in this way. I mean, I think the modern like the, hey, guys, welcome to my podcast, that kind of like that’s the lifestyle influencer accent that traces all the way back to like Kim K and the Paris Hilton And early beauty YouTubers. And then that kind of filtered into TikTok. And that same voice with the uptalk and the vocal fry is preserved because there’s this thing called the linguistic founder effect, where you kind of follow in the footsteps of people Who came before you linguistically. And that’s why also platforms do have different commenting cultures and different linguistic cultures. And that’s only one type of influencer accent. I obviously- Pause on that one. Chris Williamson What are they trying to achieve with the lifestyle influencer accent? What are the important parts and what’s the outcome they’re trying to get toward? Adam Aleksic Yeah, great question. There’s a few things going on. One of it is just social signaling. It’s saying I’m part of your group because that’s what all of language does. So there is a identity marker of what it’s like to be an influencer. And so you’re performing this idea of an influencer, also performing relatability to the young woman who are watching you. At the same time, the accent is optimized for the algorithm. There’s an element of retention, which is how long you watch the video. And when you drag out words, it kind of works better for captivating your audience. Dead silence is very bad on the algorithm. So if you have a live stream or something, you want to drag out your final syllable. So actually that up talk where you kind of lengthen your final vowel is very good for online hooking. No way. Chris Williamson So if you don’t have your next sentence queued up, you can have a holding pattern, which is the end of the last word so that you know what you’re going to say at the end. Adam Aleksic And then after that, you can work out what’s coming next. That’s exactly it. In linguistics. Holy fuck. It’s called floor holding. It’s an actual like strategy that people use before, you know, social media. If you’re on a stage, if you’re on a debate, you want to keep grabbing people’s attention. So use things like filler words. Chris Williamson Actually, um is a great example of a floor holding tactic where you are trying to get people to keep listening to you, even though you don’t have something immediately to say. Alex O’Connor taught me this great one about Christopher Hitchens that if he was in the middle of a debate and he needed to take a sip of water or have a thought, he would get halfway through The sentence and then would continue from there. And I thought, that’s so fucking cool, as opposed to pausing at the end and then thinking about what he was going to say by taking or even asking. So you might say, why is that the case? Well, really what we need to consider is, oh, I’m waiting. So the use of silence. We want to know what comes next. Bingo. Yeah. Adam Aleksic And same with the influencers. It’s like, if there’s an up talk, there’s an implied, I’m not done speaking. (Time 0:05:35)
Lifestyle And Educational Voices Signal Different Roles
- Different creator styles use different vocal strategies because they want different relationships with the audience.
- Adam Aleksic contrasts cozy lifestyle speech that signals parasocial relatability with faster educational speech that signals authority and trust. Transcript: Adam Aleksic I like up talk because that’s like I’ve sort of trained myself into speaking. I call an educational influencer accent, which is different than that lifestyle influencer. OK, give me the educational influencer accent. The most interesting thing about that is, you know, and I kind of stress more words to keep you watching my videos and I’ll talk a little faster. And I clearly talk quickly in real life. But I think there’s a difference between a conversational style and then when I’m purely reciting a scripted video to hook you maximally for your attention. Chris Williamson Okay. So you’re stressing individual words, speaking a bit more quickly. That’s interesting that the Valley Girl Vocal Fry lifestyle influencer, what I get the sense of as someone who isn’t exactly a connoisseur of that content is a softness, a sort of welcomingness, Almost a familiarity, an attempt to sort of show, hey guys, welcome back to my channel. It’s almost welcoming you through the door. Whereas it’s much sharper when you’re thinking about the educational influencer, but given that one is kind of slow, although there’s no breaks, but it’s certainly not da-da It’s Much more cozy. And the other is significantly more aggressive in terms of its pacing. Absolutely. Adam Aleksic Well, it’s, again, the question of what are you trying to do on the meta level? The lifestyle influencer wants you to feel like you’re parasocially watching this video. An educational influencer wants you to feel like they’re a trusted source of authority. And it’s that level of communication that’s happening there. I don’t actually want you to relate to me 100%. I want you to think of me as a teacher if I’m talking to you. (Time 0:09:26)
Algorithms Push Speech Toward Homogenized Accents
- Algorithmic media pressures creators toward a more standard, legible accent, even when their native accent is perfectly valid.
- Adam Aleksic compares the algorithm to a bottleneck that homogenizes speech before new micro-dialects re-emerge inside communities. Transcript: Adam Aleksic 100%. I mean, that’s a big part of linguistics. Chris Williamson Yeah. Unreal. So I just really loved the first time I ever worked with a speech coach. And he said his description to me was vowels give words color and consonants give them structure. And one of the problems being from the Northeast of the UK, we have a glottal stop typically. So people say butter, butter, there’s two T’s in butter and they’re not saying either of them. And neither was I when I was younger. By removing or by losing those consonants, you sort of fall through words. They don’t have the same kind of structure, clarity, clippiness, and bringing those back in helps to give it a little bit more form. Adam Aleksic But what you’re describing here that you’ve modified your speaking style for what will perform better online is kind of exactly this greater homogenization effect that’s happening. There’s nothing less valid about a Northland dialect than the received pronunciation or the transatlantic accent or any of these things we just bullshit into thinking that some of These are like fancier than other accents uh but it’s all in our heads and yet there’s still this pressure to perform to use a more standard pronunciation of english for my book i interviewed A lot of um indian creators who feel like they can’t speak in indian accents that’s kind of maligned upon. And seen as low status. Yeah. And they have to kind of code switch into more British sounding or American sounding accents. Chris Williamson Wow. Well, in my defense, or at least in my mother’s defense, she was sort of slapping me on the wrist and beating it out of me as a child. So I didn’t make it to adulthood without saying butter correctly. Adam Aleksic Well, that’s because of an ingrained shame. There really is nothing inherently wrong with you speaking in a Northern English. I’m going to go back to it. I’m going to fucking go back to it, mate. And you fucking cannot stop me from saying butter as much as I want. The cost is you might go less viral because the viewer has an expectation that I want you to be speaking the way I expect you to speak. Chris Williamson Also, there is a degree of legibility or illegibility. But if you get a strong Geordie accent from the Northeast where I’m from, or a strong Scouse accent from Liverpool, it is as close to a different language whilst being the same language. It’s like one step away from speciation in terms of language. Adam Aleksic I think language can be correctly described as following a very similar path to evolution and that there are bottleneck events and speciation events and the algorithm for example I think is one such bottleneck that it compresses our language into you have to be speaking in these widely recognizable accents but then it speciates and creates new environments Um and so on these different platforms and in the different fandom communities on the platforms you will have new outgrowths of language that have first passed through this filter Event. (Time 0:11:15)
Livestream Speech Is Built On Delayed Payoff
- MrBeast and livestreamers use vocal suspense to delay payoff and hold attention inside bounded or endless formats.
- Adam Aleksic compares livestreamers to street performers who keep promising the backflip later so the crowd does not leave. Transcript: Adam Aleksic A beast in the room. Yeah, I was about to say. Very good. Chris Williamson What’s happening with Mr. Beast’s accent? Adam Aleksic If you look at his video and if you look at how he actually speaks in interviews, they’re completely different. He is very deliberately switching his accent to grab your attention as much as possible. He screams in it. I just bought a private island. I’m giving away a million dollars. He’s very ostentatious with it. He’s screaming at you every sentence. Because that works for his 14-year viewer’s attention spans. He’s speaking to a different audience than somebody trying to educate and a different audience than somebody trying to appear relatable because he’s clearly being ostentatious So it’s reflected in his vocal style like he sounds like he’s about to give away a million dollars even as he does it you know so it’s excitement loudness what else uh shock and awe really You just you want to the viewer to remain so dumbfounded watching the video that they don’t even think to scroll away it’s like a magician you just want to keep the attention going i saw Chris Williamson A live streamer in the wild for the first time ever a couple of months ago and i’ve obviously i’ve seen live streams online i’ve seen some irl stuff not tons but seeing an irl streamer from Side camera or behind camera was a real experience. It was at the Beast Games 2 premiere in Hollywood. And what I found fascinating was because the live stream essentially never ends until it finally does, there is this permanent edging of the audience that there will be a payoff, but Not yet. And there will be a payoff, but not yet. At least with Beast, it’s like we’re gonna go to the most expensive gym in the world but first i’m gonna show you the cheapest and now i’m gonna show you one a bit more expensive and now i’m Adam Aleksic Gonna and then finally you do it and there’s a payoff and then you’re done and the video is finished yeah different medium because it’s bounded by a specific time so you know the beast Video is 14 minutes long but the live stream is lasting however long it’s kind of definitely live performers if you go to like a public gathering and there’s those people doing backflips In a crowd like uh for money or whatever they won’t do the backflips immediately because nobody like people leave immediately dance around for ages dance around they’ll do around a Collection of the money they’ll dance around some more they’ll do another round of collect i promise guys we’re gonna get to the backflips and you keep watching because they’re edging You it’s what’s yeah exactly what’s happening and if you look at like tiktok live streams i keep getting click baited by this like video of this guy trying to peel an egg and he gets the Last part of the egg and he’s like, he keeps like edging us like I’m going to take off the shell here. But I think there’s something of an important parallel between that visual way that you get click baited and the auditory and linguistic way that happens as well. Okay. How so? Well, live streaming, I think there is a dissolution between this online presentation and the offline presentation. I think it’s particularly dangerous because it does play into this attention mechanism, but in real life where you’re exploiting real people for it. Linguistically speaking, that does mean you’re going to keep doing the up talks. You’re going um speak in attention grabbing manners all that is yeah and you do kind of delay gratification when i do a video and i script it out i kind of don’t immediately say the resolution Of the question i pose at the start and you’ll see this a lot in youtube videos the payoffs held until (Time 0:13:57)
Why 4chan Was A Slang Incubator
- 4chan became a powerful slang incubator because anonymity forced users to prove in-group membership through language alone.
- Adam Aleksic says words like maxing and pilled spread because slang that feels funny or identity-marking travels fast. Transcript: Chris Williamson The end yeah what other subcultures online do you think are particularly interesting linguistically? Oh, wow. I mean, I’ve spent a lot of time studying the language of the Manosphere. Adam Aleksic I think it’s particularly interesting because half of Gen Z slang is either African American English or it’s from 4chan. And you do have a lot of those incel words trickling in. Definitely 4chan was a linguistic incubator for decades. And uh well a decade and uh all these new words came came out of it that are still slowly diffusing into more mainstream culture like maxing and pilled and you know um gooning what made 4chan such a useful incubator for language there’s the anonymity on the platform where users need to demonstrate a shared proficiency in slang to show that they’re not a normie. And there’s this huge selection pressure to show that you’re one of the 4chan users. Chris Williamson And because it’s such a constrained platform, you can’t do video, you can’t do voice, you’re not doing face, you don’t know the identity of someone. You need to very quickly, through your language, identify I am one of you, not one of them. Adam Aleksic Yeah, you can do like images and things, which that’s how we get a lot of memes also come from there. But linguistically, yeah, there’s… No one’s posting a selfie, though, right? To say, this is me, I am one of us. In the sense that language is identity. Yeah. 100% of these people on Fortune are also trying to build a shared identity for themselves. Self-branding, belonging. And it’s cool to come up with the new joke. And language spreads when it’s funny. It does. We like saying things that are funny. That’s reasonable. It’s funny to say I’m podcast maxing. Chris Williamson Yeah, that’s true. Well, I am. I have been for eight years now. I am podcast maxing. What about newscasters? How can they speak so strangely? They’re doing the exact same thing. This just in. And they speak in this authoritative kind of manner. Adam Aleksic It’s doing the exact same thing as the educational influencer, really. It’s a way of grabbing attention that’s conditioned to a certain medium. (Time 0:17:00)
The Internet Rewards Arousal Over Contentment
- Viral systems reward mental arousal more than genuine value, so distribution often beats substance online.
- Adam Aleksic says anger, fear, awe, and humor trigger clicks, while contentment rarely spreads because warm fuzzy feelings do not hit the like button. Transcript: Chris Williamson So if you get booked for a TED Talk, you should just try and get clip farmed? Adam Aleksic I think so. Chris Williamson How would you do that? Adam Aleksic What actually matters, like, I don’t know. The audience of TED Talk is, I guess, aspirational speakers themselves. Um like it’s if you have a real message to say it’s probably not the audience that’s there it’s probably better if you transmit it on the internet um because you could reach that audience And that’s the idea behind six seven and behind gesture maxing and all that stuff is that distribution matters more than the content itself that you’re just saying the thing that goes Viral and if we’re existing in a age of social media virality the ted talk is kind of a dead format um existing as this quasi online talk which was fantastic in the early days of youtube When there wasn’t enough content going on but now the media ecosystem is oversaturated and the ted talks have way fewer views than they used to because they don’t do the same function Chris Williamson That they did in the early internet well especially because one video can get you can write a book and then each sentence can be sold individually and then even those sentences can be Reproduced and reproduced and reproduced and individual productions of those can be reshared so yeah, you’re actually looking for as much distribution as possible. When, what was it called? The HH bomb thing that happened with the guys in the Miami club where they played that Kanye song and the Wendell Insane Bar. That was every single second of that video was broken down and shared and reshared and published and republished and commented on. And that’s a single book just being sold word by word, essentially. Adam Aleksic And what that points to is that there is a dangerous misalignment between human preferences. Like I can imagine that most of us don’t think that song is good for humanity. And then what goes viral online? Because online, there are certain emotions that are rewarded more than others. There’s anger, fear, awe, humor, things that trigger a state of mental arousal where your brain is more activated. Now, things that don’t do that is like contentment. Contentment makes you feel warm and fuzzy inside, but it doesn’t trigger your brain to click a like button. The like button, of course, is more of a metric of how willing you are to click this button than it is whether you like something. And you’re more willing to click a button if your brain is activated and your brain’s not activated when you feel warm and fuzzy, which means warm and fuzzy ideas are not going to spread Online. The things that are going to spread are rage bait and click bait. (Time 0:23:33)
Online Wellness Often Performs Rather Than Heals
- Social media often performs wellness rather than creating it, because true calm is visually boring and hard to monetize.
- Adam Aleksic contrasts aesthetic yoga-mat content with actual wellness, which may look more like quietly sitting on a couch. Transcript: Chris Williamson So fascinating. So if you’re a meditation teacher by design, because you make people feel good and you get them out of that brain mode, you’re going to get less engagement, which means that you’re going To go less viral, which means there’s less of an incentive for you to keep doing your content. Adam Aleksic Look at the wellness space the same way movie phone calls perform what it’s like to be a phone call. Wellness influencers are performing the idea of wellness, but it’s this hyper aestheticized, sanitized, clean girl thing where you’re on a yoga mat doing Pilates or whatever. But that doesn’t like you’re presenting this hyper wellness idea. That’s not true wellness. And if you’re actually feeling warm and fuzzy, you don’t need to prove that to other people. You don’t need to play like you’re feeling good. Chris Williamson Yeah. You’re not doing yoga in the living room with your floor to ceiling windows and you’re waving sage everywhere. You’re sat on the couch, relaxing. Adam Aleksic Sometimes it’s just watching a movie is, you know, sitting on the couch. Chris Williamson But not sufficiently visually interesting. So it wouldn’t be compelling for people. (Time 0:25:50)
Gay Slang Grew From Signaling And Survival
- Gay accents and slang often emerged as survival tools for signaling identity inside hostile environments.
- Adam Aleksic cites Polari in Britain and ballroom slang like slay, serve, queen, and king as ways marginalized groups built status and recognition. Transcript: Chris Williamson What about the gay male accent? What’s going on there? Yeah, 100%. Adam Aleksic There’s a lot of research on, well, emerging research on lesbian accent as well, but gay accent, that there is a certain way of talking that, of course, will differ between different Communities. And it’s not a monolith. But you know, you can recognize when somebody talks in a gay accent. There’s a few sociological things going on. I think it’s incorrect to say that they talk more like women, but they adopt many strategies that are similar to how women have talked. They raise certain vowels and they will. Yeah. And it’s all kind of the same identity thing. It’s historically a way, like the gay slang words Which is a lot of our Gen Z slang words Also come from gay ballroom speech What like? Oh, like slay, serve, queen, cooked, ate Cooked is gay? Yeah, I’m pretty sure that comes Well, there’s cooking and cooked Which come from different sources Cooking is sports slang Yeah, playing well. Yeah. Yeah. Unreal. Chris Williamson So I wonder if there’s stuff that even we wouldn’t notice, that there’s little identifiers in the gay community, like top speak in one way and bottom speak in another. Or I guess there’s guys that present in a much more masculine manner and there’s guys that present in a much more feminine manner. Interesting conversation I had over dinner, probably best to have it over dinner. Um, looking at, uh, what it is, the, the, the presentation that most straight men notice in gay men and what they notice is what you said, which is, are you coding as female? Not as female, in a manner that somebody who isn’t a part of that culture would identify as feminine. I’m going to sound like a broken clock, but everything is performing the idea of something. Adam Aleksic And so gay men perform the idea of being gay, which is fine. Straight men perform the idea of being straight. And it’s also a way to signal to other people. Like in historically, gay men had to be closeted and they needed ways of signaling other gay men that, hey, I’m chill and we should hang out, you know. And that’s sort of linguistically, there are little cues you can drop that hint at I’m a gay man. Right. What like? Well, using certain slang words like I’m thinking about like, I don’t know, cottaging in Britain, but when homosexuality was illegal, there’s like certain ways of tapping your foot Or Polari was a whole gay cant, like a kind of a micro language created in England that was used specifically by gay people as a way of evading detection by police because police didn’t Know what was going on. And it was a way of signaling a shared identity for themselves. And we see sort of gay micro languages emerge everywhere. In the Philippines, there’s one called Swardspeak. There’s one in South Africa. Every community, because gay people have been historically kind of marginalized, they need ways to come up with subversion of the traditional norms of language. Do you know what capoeira is? It sounds British. It’s a Brazilian martial art. Chris Williamson Brazilian is what I meant. So capoeira was a martial art developed in brazil when they were under a military rule and they weren’t allowed to practice fighting because they didn’t want there to be a military force That could rise up so this thing if you watch a video of it looks very distinctive very dancy it kind of looks like that i mean it very quickly gets into a fighting art but um that makes me Think about gay guys in Britain, before it was legal, having to have a secret language. And Brazilian martial art developed by Africans taken to the country as slaves. That was it. So they weren’t allowed to practice fighting. And they’ve got music that goes with it as well, which would be a way to hide what was going on. It’s just a party. We don’t need to worry about that. It’s just a party. And yeah, the… Adam Aleksic Wow, That’s amazing. Chris Williamson Yeah. Adam Aleksic Well, if we accept that language is a tool of identity, identity is tied to power. Who’s in control as part of your identity. And so we see the English language, which is defined by these white British people in the 1700s or whatever, and we’re still following the norms. Yeah. Love them. But it doesn’t represent all the speakers of English. And so different speakers try to come up with different ways to subvert that structure that’s imposed upon them and so a lot of that has been african-american english speakers who now Have come up with a lot of slang words that later bled into mainstream gen z slang or um specifically gay people because these are straight white men uh language and so it’s a way of subverting Of establishing their own norms of language um king and queen for example like the slang word what’s up king you know like that or what’s up queen that uh that comes from ballroom slang In new york city in the 1980s which is this like black gay latino space um black gay latino black and latino gay know, gay people in New York City. And it was a way of elevating people in that community. I see you on the status of royalty because we are not seen as that by society. And that even goes back even further to the history of kind of like black people in the United States. A lot of slang goes from black people to gay people and then to like the straight white girlfriends of gay men and then to the mainstream English. (Time 0:26:44)
Every Person Speaks Their Own Version Of Language
- Language is not one shared system so much as billions of individual idiolects shaped by biography and context.
- Adam Aleksic says everyone has a linguistic footprint, which is why tiny quirks can identify people like the Unabomber example Chris Williamson mentions. Transcript: Chris Williamson Okay. So there’s a pipeline. A four person human centipede with normies at the end and black people at the front. Adam Aleksic That’s pretty much it. Fantastic. Or 4chan is the other end. 4chan, black people, gay people, cool people, normies. Language spreads when it’s funny or cool. And it’s cool when when black people use it and it’s funny when 4chan people use it it can be considered funny unfortunately when black people say things as well which is a whole genre Of hood irony memes like uh um cap like is an example um or hos is a recent slang word what’s that it’s like a slang word for hose um but it comes from like a parody of african american english Um or gyat that was that was also kind of making fun of big ass yeah yeah yeah but it comes from the the word goddamn pronounced in an exaggerated african-american accent um and of course When i say that there’s many different african-american accents in the same way there’s many different gay accents and many different internet accents and i really hate to speak of Language as a monolith i’m not even sure language exists as like a thing. It’s just like we all speak separately, kind of close to people around us. And there’s like a gradient of what language is rather than a monolithic thing. The monolithic thing is this institutional assumption that there is a dictionary that can capture a snapshot of what language is. So every person has their own language in this regard. It’s called idiolect from the Greek word idios, meaning one’s own. And we all speak in a completely unique way, conditioned by our background, our upbringing, our education, the people we hung out with, the words that resonated with us based on just Our history of interacting with language. I find that really compelling that you have a linguistic footprint unlike anybody else. Chris Williamson That’s how they caught the Unabomber. Yes, his brother found out that he said, eat your cake and have it too, as opposed to have your cake and eat it too, because the one that he used actually makes more sense, but was completely Unique. Exactly. Adam Aleksic And so we all have these little quirks. Whether you think you do or not, they’re there. What about lesbian accents? This is harder to identify. And there are studies showing that speakers can identify a lesbian accent, but there are very mixed results on what defines one. There is, again, indication that they speak a little closer to the idea of a masculine language, and yet at the same time, it would be reductive to say that. So there is certain stuff going on with perhaps lowered vowels and maybe a deeper voice. But again, I would be generalizing to say that we know for sure there definitely is something going on, but the (Time 0:31:50)
Identity Is A Performance Repeated Into Reality
- Much of speech and identity works like performance because people adapt roles to rooms, audiences, and eras.
- Adam Aleksic uses Goffman to argue masculinity, podcasting, and everyday conversation are repeated presentations that become socially real through performance. Transcript: Adam Aleksic It’s really cool. I’m not entirely sure what you mean. I think people should all read this guy, Irving Goffman. He’s a sociologist from the 1960s, and he comes up with this great book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. And he describes how we all adopt faces or roles in society. There’s a front facing role and a back facing. So when you’re on stage, you’re off stage. And when you’re on stage right now, we’re presenting to the public. We are on stage. We’re presenting as ourselves. But as soon as we get off the podcast, we might speak more casually because there’s a different way of communicating when you know there’s this invisible audience present. In the same way, when you’re literally on a stage or you’re literally backstage that you’ll do the same thing. But if you’re talking in front of your parents versus you’re talking with your friends, you’ll adopt different registers. And it’s that kind of the same thing we were describing with different rooms and different platforms. And you have an idea of what your environment is and you will mold yourself into the role you see that environment as bringing to you and so we do everything through this idea of a role and All of what we do is a performance to be a man is kind of a performance like we need to keep replicating this idea of manhood we both um like have beards we both uh dress and talk a certain way Um and in doing so we’re kind of adopting symbols of masculinity and clavicular is doing a great job of that himself i’ve got it i i’ve got a take on that which is i think it’s uh the most caricatured Chris Williamson Traits of masculinity, not necessarily in terms of speech, because you might say a powerful, precise, educated, or a brusque, maybe even someone who’s very curt, with the way that They spoke a strong and silent type. But that’s because masculinity is couched within 2026. What does it mean for masculinity to be that way? I think visually masculinity has just been going in one direction. If you look at the tracking of Luke Skywalker star action figures over time in the 60s, he was super skinny. And then in the 90s, again, do me a comparison, just search a chad gpt luke skywalker action figure over time comparison and um yeah he just he goes on a very heavy course of testosterone For about six decades that’s really interesting and um just gets more and more and more and more jacked um so i think what’s happening is a performance of masculinity that’s the best Way to put it luke skywalker looks maxed luke sky absolutely moggs, dude. Yet he’s performing masculinity. It’s a male-to visual comparison. Adam Aleksic And there is always an evolving definition of masculinity too. Like back in ancient Rome, being masculine means you could have sex with other men as long as you weren’t a bottom. That would be like not masculine. Is that true? That was the definition of masculinity for a certain period in ancient Rome. Allowed to fuck just you’re you you have to fuck if you are caesar was famously offended uh not at the accusation that he was gay but the accusation that he was a bottom uh because that’s The roman idea But it’s an evolving idea. Whether men should have long hair or short hair, whether we should, you know, what it means to be a man is always a moving target and we’re always performing for this target. So it just proves how arbitrary it is. That right now, of course, there is a current 2026 idea of a man that we’re performing toward. (Time 0:35:17)
A Thumbs Up Emoji Reached Court
- Courts already treat emojis as meaningful evidence, even when their meaning shifts by context and era.
- Adam Aleksic recounts a Canadian grain dispute where a thumbs-up emoji was argued to mean either acknowledgment or legal agreement. Transcript: Chris Williamson Saw a court case where they were trying to determine what this emoji meant. Adam Aleksic How did it have, did it imply- Was it the farmer in Canada? Chris Williamson What was this one? Adam Aleksic Okay, so there’s a great court case where there was a farmer who had a contract for grain shipments and he would occasionally, like they did month by month and they would sign off with A yes or whatever. And then one month, the farmer signs off with an OK emoji, just like thumbs up. And the grain supplier doesn’t deliver the grain or something like that. And then the farmer sues the grain supplier. Maybe I’m getting the other way around. But the point is, the court case was about whether the thumbs up emoji legally constituted an affirmation of this agreement occurring. One person said this could be acknowledgement, and the other person said this is a direct agreement. And I think the court case ruled in favor of thumbs up being an agreement, but it was kind of based on previous context, right? Because previous context was- The long established history of emojis in court cases. Right. Well, there’s a few things going on. Yeah. What was the one you were thinking of? Chris Williamson There was a murder case, and it was about intent. It was about whether or not this person had intended to kill somebody or not. And it’s an interpretation of what this emoji means. And it’s so funny because it’s a single thing, right? There’s no intonation. I guess it’s couched in what has been said before and after, but if you just take it on its own, there is no different way to say it. There is no different way to spell it. It’s only been around for 15 less than 15 years something like that probably okay so the definition of it hasn’t had enough time to really cement itself and become established well that’s Adam Aleksic The thing that’s so fluid emoji definitions are also constantly changing like the crying emoji once meant literally crying and then it meant laughing. (Time 0:41:25)
Why Young People Keep Driving Slang
- Young people drive slang because they are both more linguistically flexible and motivated to separate from parents.
- Adam Aleksic says most slang innovation comes from roughly ages 10 to 25, while institutions mostly legitimize words after the fact. Transcript: Chris Williamson Mentioned black people gay people cool people normal people young people how much do they drive language forward? Because young people are almost always seen as being cool, but they’re also the ones that have got the least cemented history with regards to their linguistic use. Adam Aleksic Yeah, exactly. They’re the ones that are the earliest to adopt new words because older people have this cemented idea of what language is. Younger people are both more flexible with that and they’re trying to build a shared identity for themselves. And I know I keep bringing identity into it, but that’s what language is. It’s a way of, you know, figuring out who you are and what kind of words you want to use. And you don’t want to sound like your mother. You want to sound like your peers. Chris Williamson Yeah, how much of the changes in language is just because kids want to differentiate themselves from their parents? Adam Aleksic That’s a huge part of it. Most of language change, I would say, is driven by people, like right now, honestly, middle schoolers. But historically, people between the ages of like 10 and 25 are the ones coming up with slang. Now, of course, there’s different types of how language gets adopted. There’s institutional words. So like iPhone is a new word, but it’s not a slang word. Podcast, a shortening of iPod plus broadcast um that’s sort of new but that these things come from more institutional avenues uh that’s another route or mechanism of language change But for the slang which is this kind of lower status feeling of language that eventually can become just real language um that comes from younger people so all the video game terms we See in uh bleeding into mainstream english um npc skill issue that kind of stuff um or all the yeah the the black people uh or the uh incel language um all that’s kind of the driven by young Chris Williamson People right now how effective are institutions at top-down dictating language and linguistic use? Because when I think about, and this might just be because I’m terminally online, when I think about most of the language that I see, yeah, you’re right with podcasts, but they’re usually Categories. They’re not the sort of thing that people are using as a important identifier of the way that they’re put together. And it doesn’t really seem to be shaping culture. Maybe it represents something that shapes culture, but the words itself won’t. Adam Aleksic So how easy is it for people in power to top down dictate the way that language is used? If it feels like a word is intentionally being forced upon you, we actually often feel a resistance to it. There’s a, in the movie mean girls gretchen famously couldn’t make the word fetch happen she was trying to make fetch yeah yeah um and that’s because it felt forced so if you feel like Someone is pushing a word onto you you might actually not want to adopt it there is a difference with institutional acceptance so if you see a word in a dictionary uh that’s just like this Is accepted as language um even though of course there’s just an idea of language but you might point to that now and you’ll see news outlets only use words that are in the dictionary or Books in academic publishing and all this stuff will use this standard idea of language which is filtered through the institutions so they’re not forcing the word they’re merely once A word has been used around for long enough, they legitimize it. (Time 0:45:27)
Every Word Online Became Metadata
- Online speech now serves the attention economy first because every word doubles as metadata for algorithms.
- Adam Aleksic says platforms parse every term as a distribution signal, shaping both audience interpretation and how far a video travels. Transcript: Adam Aleksic And more just get people aware of what creators are already doing to you. Oh, okay. You’re like a public service announcement for creators. Chris Williamson Yeah. PSA, everybody’s doing everything for your attention. Adam Aleksic The platforms have monetized your attention. They are commodifying your data and your information and they’re trying to sell you ads. Everything’s based based around your attention. They create incentive structures now for influencers to replicate, where the attention economy, famously, just runs around what will grab your attention. That means our language will all serve that end primarily. Then there’s maybe a secondary purpose of I want to sound like I know what I’m talking about or I want to sound relatable. But it starts with attention and will use keywords. Like all words are keywords at this point. Metadata used to be like their search engine optimization terms that you would put in a website description to make sure it ranks higher. Every single term now is a search engine optimization term because the algorithm is looking at every single word you use. And it’s using that to create a cluster representation of what your video is in this mathematical space. And it uses that to push out a video. And so by using a word, you are creating a signal for the algorithm that this video should be distributed in a certain way. And then you are also creating signals for the viewers that you should look at the video a certain way. There’s several meta layers to everything we’re saying. Chris Williamson I feel like you’re a guy that went away for a decade to some mountaintop Kung Fu retreat and learned a bunch of really dangerous martial arts where you can kill a guy with one touch. And I’m now asking, okay, so how do I kill guys with one touch? And you’re saying, well, what I’m here to do is I’m here to warn people about the one touch death move. That’s exactly what it feels like. Adam Aleksic I think we should be immensely critical of these platforms. And I’m a big believer that the medium is the message, that the way we consume media strongly affects everything we understand, that algorithms are uniquely constraining our language To this bottleneck we’ve described, that they are shaping our expression. And if they’re doing it to our language, that’s one thing, because I do think language, again, is this tool that’s sort of neutral. But they’re also doing it to our ideas, our discussion, our greater sense of reality. There are certain biases that get coded into the algorithm that get perpetuated. We see the same thing happening with AI. There’s a bottleneck again there. What kind of language goes in? What kind of language is reinforced into the model? And then what kind of language goes out? Nothing is neutral when it’s happening through a tech intermediary that’s trying to make money off of you. (Time 0:52:40)
ChatGPT Is Training Humans To Sound Like It
- AI is already feeding linguistic biases back into human speech, with words like delve spiking after ChatGPT popularized them.
- Adam Aleksic links this to reinforcement workers, Latin prestige bias, and broader concerns that hidden model biases reshape reality itself. Transcript: Chris Williamson Talk to me about what AI is doing to language. Adam Aleksic You know about the word Delve? Delve, to sort of jump into. Yeah. So we have studies indicating that since ChatGPT came out, usage of the word delve has spiked a thousand percent since before 2022. Why does ChatGPT like delve? So ChatGPT uses the word delve 10 times more than regular because there is a bias in the reinforcement learning process, which is when the words get trained into the model. So one, there’s a few things going on here. One, the reinforcement workers are in Nigeria and Kenya, where they do actually say delve at higher rates but still not that high and that’s partially they’re rewarding words that They’re familiar with two delve is a latin word and we know that chat gpt exhibits a latin-based bias over germanic words because again latin supremacy it’s prestige it’s like you think Latin sounds fancier than germanic words like germanic words are basic ones like the but and whatever and then latin words or dig in is a germanic word versus is a Latin-derived word. Right. And it sounds fancier to say the Latin word. And because these models are trained to sound like they know what they’re talking about, they’re going to use more of the romance language stuff. They’re trained to sound confident and incisive and sycophantic, and they will use certain words that perpetuate that. And then that gets reinforced into the model. So all this stuff happens. And when you’re a reinforcement worker clicking through what kind of words are okay and not okay, you don’t really catch a small discrepancy like that, that delve is showing up a little Bit more. So it accidentally gets reinforced into the model. And then Chachapiti starts spitting out the word delve more. And now we have evidence in the past few years that humans in our spontaneous spoken conversation are also starting to use the word delve more. So the creature that programmed the AI is being programmed by the AI. Chris Williamson We are now being trained by ChachiPT to use different language. In other news, Shopify powers 10% of all e-commerce companies in the US. They are the driving force behind Gymshark and Skims and Aloe and Nutonic, which is why I partnered with them, because when it comes to converting browsers into buyers, they are best In class. Their checkout is 36% better on average compared to other leading commerce platforms. And with shop pay, you can boost conversions up to 50%. Basically, you didn’t get into business to learn how to code or build a website or deal with the inventory stuff bullshit on the back end. You just want to get down to creating and promoting an awesome product. And Shopify takes all of the mess off your hands and allows you to focus on the job you actually came here to do, designing and selling the thing that you love. So upgrade your business and get the same checkout that we use with Nutonic with Shopify. Now you can sign up for a one dollar per month trial period by going to the link in the description below or heading to shopify.com/modern wisdom all lowercase that’s shopify.com/modern Adam Aleksic Wisdom wasn’t there a study done on british politicians and what they’d been saying and the house of chambers are now saying i rise to speak instead of i don’t know what the norm was before, But they’re using a US colloquial term, which is clearly indicating that their speeches are written by ChachiBT. We’ve seen academic research papers that probably 13% of all research abstracts are written aided by some kind of large language model. You can’t trust any source, whether you think it’s, so it’s not even you’re being directly influenced by the AI. It’s you’re being influenced by somebody else who was influenced by AI. You’re reading a text that you don’t know is written by AI. All of LinkedIn is already like, I can’t tell whether it’s AI or these people genuinely think like this, but that you speak in the bullet points that it’s not just X, it’s Y, that’s the Negative parallelism, which also sounds, again, things that sound incisive are reinforced into the model. And then they end up affecting our actual speech patterns. Chris Williamson But what it also does is it means that you need to counter signal away from it. So I’m going to draw an analogy to Ozempic. Ozempic at the moment means that people can more easily lose weight. That means that losing weight naturally becomes less high status. Something, remember when Adele lost weight in the before times, prehistoric, just did it with calorie deficit and cardio or whatever she did. Lose weight now, whether you did use Ozempic or not, you’re going to be accused of having used it. So we are now already seeing counter signaling away from the double dash. Adam Aleksic A little tasteful chub is back in. Chris Williamson Yeah, it will be soon. Aha, it’s nice. A natural, I see. What’s the double dash thing that ChattyPT got? The M-dash. M-dash. No one can use it. So I have a couple of friends. I’m going to hold on to it as a writer. Adam Aleksic Well, I think you have a competitive advantage because no one’s going to assume that you would be using ChatGPT. There is a way that ChatGPT uses the M-dash to segment thoughts in those negative parallelisms and so on. And there’s a way that a good writer can use an M-dash because Chachapati speaks predictably and a good writer will speak unpredictably. Yeah. I’m friends with some very good writers and they love the use of the MDash. Chris Williamson And now they feel like they need to count the signal away from it. Nobody wants to use the word Delve. I don’t use the word Delve. We’re going to feel or we’re going to see the word Delve drop off because people are going to be terrified that even if that was the word I wanted to dig in. Here’s the thing. Delve is merely the poster child for a much broader phenomenon. Adam Aleksic We got commendable, we got meticulous, crucial, potential, significant. All of these words, all kind of Latin derived, are also increasing with chat GPT, but we’re only pointing to delve in the M-dash because those are the easiest things to pick up on. There’s so many smaller things, and I’m more concerned about the insidious things. Again, not linguistically. I think language should serve as a signal for this broader thing that’s happening. If it’s a reflection of our reality, that means our reality is being shaped by chat GPT. I don’t think there’s anything inherently harmful to the word commendable or meticulous but the fact that we are also proven to be saying those words more after chat gpt has been proven To say those words more means that its reality is influencing our reality and i’m now concerned what if there’s a political bias a gender bias of whatever racial but like all this stuff Gets coded into the model and i mean elon musk doesn’t even hide that he like tweaks grok to like align with his political preferences so he’s being obvious about it the other uh platforms Aren’t being obvious about it maybe anthropic is doing a better job than than uh um open ai but they’re all kind of still trying to make money at the end of the day and uh they’re all doing Something that’s not aligned with human priorities. (Time 0:54:58)
Treat Viral Information As Manipulated By Default
- Stay highly skeptical of online information and spend more time offline, because viral systems reward manipulation and speed.
- Adam Aleksic warns that memecoin traders, prediction markets, and state actors now have financial incentives to push contagious ideas. Transcript: Chris Williamson Are you more concerned about social media or AI for what it’s doing to linguistics? Adam Aleksic Social media, for sure. Because whatever’s happening with AI, it then just immediately gets captured by social media. And what I’m concerned about here is that they replicate the natural way that ideas diffuse through populations idea is kind of like a virus it starts in a host it can infect other hosts You had malcolm gladwell on i think talk about this um it’s a little reductive to just say that but i think it’s a good model for understanding the way information scatters is kind of like In a virus network like it’s sort of like a disease and algorithms have created a replication of natural human social networks that operates faster that connects more nodes than ever Before which means these ideas can spread faster than ever before what that means is also misinformation can spread faster than ever before more information is not necessarily always A good thing because now you can be flooded with information. And it’s called flooding the zone where you lose track of what’s the real information among all the false information. You are being bombarded with ideas from people who have an agenda. There are mean coin traders and poly market traders who are trying to make a quick buck off of pushing certain words or ideas because now we’re betting on ideas and we’re betting on uh Their coins attached to which idea goes viral so if an idea goes more viral you make money off of it so now is there financial incentive to push certain ideas and so i think we should remain Highly skeptical of everything maybe we should touch grass more but at the very least we should be highly inquisitive of what the medium is doing to us and how it’s affecting our communication Chris Williamson Is there a science to meme language? Adam Aleksic It’s called memetics. Yeah. But there definitely are people studying how these networks work. Chris Williamson And then presumably reverse engineering it. I mean, I have to wonder, it would take a long time. There was an interesting, successful attempt by Gymshark to do a grassroots social media campaign promoting Francis Ngannou. So they used a burner account on Reddit, on maybe the UFC subreddit, to post a video supposedly of CCTV of Francis Ngannou trying to get into maybe a dry cleaners. And the door was locked and he goes like this and goes and the whole door just smashes and breaks. The entire thing was constructed. The whole thing was constructed. They filmed it. It wasn’t CCTV. It was fake glass. Francis Ngannou was wearing a Gymshark logo here. Burner account on Reddit, nothing. Just left it. Just completely set ablaze. So I wonder, okay, that’s, you know, people that are quite close to the ground floor, but they’re not, they don’t have the resources of a country. If you did, the ability to shape language, to think, what sort of words do we want people using? Can’t podcast it top down because people are going to push back if they feel like they’re being we’ve watched too much of adam’s stuff we know that people are going to push back if they Feel like this word’s being forced on them how can we maybe we need to get on fortune maybe we can start to definitely don’t no i i think um get offline as much as possible while remaining Adam Aleksic Aware and appraised of what’s happening online because i do think we should like be aware that even if we are offline this stuff will still affect us to some degree like the if your friends Are adopting ideas that come from the algorithm and you’re offline and you’re interacting with your friends you’re still going to be adopting the algorithm ideas without even knowing It so we should be highly media literate knowing that our information is probably being manipulated by these actors who have vested interests in giving us bad information and this Effect is only going to be amplified as more and more people figure out how to exploit the information ecosystem. (Time 1:04:16)
Algorithms Move The Overton Window Through Language
- Algorithmic censorship rarely kills expression outright, but it does make some ideas harder to say and easier to normalize others.
- Adam Aleksic ties algospeak to the Overton window, where repeated discourse shifts what people think is socially acceptable. Transcript: Chris Williamson We speak. How does living inside of these algorithmic constraint systems change what type of thoughts we can easily express? Because this isn’t just the language that we’re using. The whole point of 1984, sorry to go to, there’s no way we’re going to be able to get through this podcast without talking about 1984. Yeah, we had to get there. Feeding back up into your capacity to think. Adam Aleksic Yeah, it’s a controversial question in linguistics. It’s generally accepted that language is not the only thing determining thought, but it might have an influence on it that’s called linguistic relativism um i don’t think we’re gonna End up in a 1984 scenario if anything i think people should pay more attention to brave new world the aldous huxley novel where we’re entertaining ourselves and don’t aren’t even aware That we’re in a dictatorship because we’re too busy consuming content and drugs um but i i think language can truly be constrained. I wrote my book on Algo Speak on how words emerge in response to censorship, the stuff I said about the ice emoji, or just words like on a live where you can’t say kill. We come up with ways. We are incredibly tenacious as human beings to express ourselves and say what we want to say. That does not mean that some things aren’t harder to say, that certain ideas aren’t more constrained. And there’s an idea called the Overton window, which is the range of acceptable discourse in a society that right back in the day, like gay marriage was unthinkable, right? And then the Overton window moved and all of a sudden it was okay. And that was a, maybe I think a positive change, but there’s also the Overton window is moving toward looks maxing. There’s way more interest in this stuff right now. But this window moves with the amount of represented discourse that we think. It’s a consensus reality. It’s what we think other people are thinking and what is acceptable. So if a certain kind of discourse, like back in the day, more and more people started saying there was the gay liberation movement, more and more people started saying maybe gay people Should have rights, that moved the window in the direction of gay marriage. Now there’s more and more people saying like replicating these alt-right ideas, replicating that idea that looks maxing is a good way to, you know, maybe you should be on a Zempig, all This stuff. And that moves the window toward that range of discourse. (Time 1:08:20)
Gen Z Is A Social Category We Now Perform
- Generational labels like Gen Z are recent marketing-friendly categories that people now perform into existence.
- Adam Aleksic argues labels help sell cohorts to advertisers while flattening unique people into interchangeable buckets. Transcript: Chris Williamson We run it back is there is there a steel man argument for how gen z could be different i don’t think gen z exists i don’t think generations exist um these are weird social constructs that Adam Aleksic We believe exist this is your one touch death move like fucking you’re like trying to catch smoke here come the fuck i’m not denying that there’s older and younger people that there’s Familial generations right that there’s uh but we only started this idea of a broad social cohort like a generation with the lost generation after World War I, really. And then we had the silent generation with the GI generation of World War II. Then we have baby boomers. And then we’re like, all right, we don’t know what to call the next people. So Gen X, X means we don’t know. Lazy. And then it’s like, OK, millennial is good enough. And then it’s like, well, we’re two after Gen X. We’ll call it Gen Z. Well, we ran out of the alphabet. We’ll call it Gen Alpha. That’s literally it’s all made up and it started in the early 1900s. But it’s become more and more salient. And this is, if anything, a new category that can be used to sell you as a consumer demographic that can commodify you, that they have manufactured Gen Z as a concept, that now we’re also Performing what it means to be Gen Z, whereas a person in the 1800s wouldn’t perform for their social cohort because there was no social cohort. It’s simply you are the age that you are. And now I’m supposed to, as an older Gen Z person, have more in touch with a younger Gen Z person than a younger millennial. But really, I feel much more in common with younger millennials. It’s all made up. And yet, there’s this idea now of being Gen Z that is forced upon us and is part of this broader social media tendency to label every part of us as human beings and put us into buckets that Actually do not describe us perfectly. Chris Williamson The self-branding is constraining because it’s giving you another role to perform to. Adam Aleksic A label is kind of a violent thing to impose on someone because now it’s you either have to identify with or against the label. Once it’s out there, it’s out there. And now I need to choose whether I feel more like Gen Z or not like Gen Z. And now I need to choose whether i’m cottagecore or not cottagecore whether i’m a swifty or not a swifty and all these things kind of combine and now i’m all of a sudden i’m a cottagecore Swifty gen z whatever uh me too but really at the end of the day i’m just every person is a unique human being in the same way that we have a unique idiolect a unique dialect that is our own Way of speaking we have a unique identity um as a linguist i have one word tattooed on my body it’s the word umwelt it means the world as it is perceived by a particular person. And I really like this idea that we all really see the world in a completely unique way. And yet when we put ourselves into buckets and when we pretend that we are, it’s nice to feel like we are like other people. And it’s a useful thing to have a category to kind of signal toward your identity, but you are completely unique. And what social media wants to do is put you into small buckets, yes, but buckets that really make you interchangeable with other people. (Time 1:11:03)
Use Many Frameworks To Resist Simple Stories
- Consume as many frameworks and media types as possible instead of trusting one total explanation.
- Adam Aleksic says algorithms, AI, and news all filter reality, so broader input helps counter confirmation and sampling bias. Transcript: Adam Aleksic We should adopt as many frameworks as possible. Sorry, I went on a tangent there. But if you have too many frameworks, it becomes chaotic. Chris Williamson And that also becomes, I think, difficult sometimes to amalgamate together. Adam Aleksic My general worldview, I think, is characterized by trying to understand as many frameworks as possible. And they all kind of point in at the- You’re a framework maximalist. Maybe, maybe. Because they all point at this indescribable whole. We can never know, you know, what unnamed dow or whatever the middle thing is that we’re trying to figure out what reality is yeah uh but everything else is signaling or pointing at it And if you broaden your worldview as much as possible and consume as many different forms of media as possible i do think maybe we should be on algorithms a little bit we should also be Reading regular news and we should also remember that’s biased and we should remember we should like be consuming as many different forms of media as possible and we should be consuming As many different ideas and perspectives as possible because that helps us better understand what’s really going on rather than this biased uh we’re always looking at the world through Like a confirmation bias sampling bias like uh everything’s filtered through the algorithm everything’s filtered through ai and if you try to just consume your worldview through That you’re going to be limited so it consume other things as well touch grass know, and then maybe we can build a better picture of what the real world is. (Time 1:16:43)
Word Histories Hide Weird Old Metaphors
- Their rapid-fire etymology game shows how word histories preserve strange physical and cultural metaphors.
- Adam Aleksic explains muscle came from little mouse, salary from salt, and orange lost its initial n in a norange. Transcript: Chris Williamson Saturday guy I’m a Saturday guy a big Saturday guy alright I want to play surprising word histories with you okay muscle it comes from the Latin word for mouse, little mouse, musculus. Why? Adam Aleksic It like looks like a mouse when it moves under your skin, right? Hey, they call me the etymology nerd for a reason. No, I’m going to flop the rest of them. I can’t wait. This is going to be so good. Salary. Salary is the Latin word for salt. They would pay wages in salt, sal. All right. Next one. Assassin. That comes from Arabic hashishin. It meant marijuana hashish consumer. Yeah. Because they would like, it was a sect. Chris Williamson You’re scaring me. Adam Aleksic It was a sect in like Persia that would just like get high and like kill people. I don’t know what they were doing, but that was kind of the mythology of it. The Nitzari Ismaili sect. All right. You’re terrifying. Candidate. From Latin Candidus, white robed. So a candidate that was like white was associated with purity. So it was like you were vying for a pure noble office if you wore white. Chris Williamson Okay. Did the word girl originally mean a young woman or did it once mean something completely different? Adam Aleksic I think it was like a gender neutral term. It could mean boy. Correct. And any young person. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. How did silly go from meaning blessed to meaning stupid? Well, in the same sense that like awful and awesome, both share that root awe. Like when something has just an emotional valence to it like a quality to it it can move easily between different boundaries but uh what did you have there uh the old english of salig meant Blessed or fortunate and over centuries it drifted through innocent naive and then yeah foolish it’s a semantic drift is uh yeah how words evolve over time and it is like terrible again. And all the like words that describe this shaking feeling you get can really range easily between the same word is terrific, terrible, terrifying. So it can quickly move between different types of emotions because how do we even describe what’s going on here, you know? Yeah, with difficulty. Ancient Aztec word for avocado. What else did it mean? Oh, avocatl. And it had a secondary definition of testicle. Nightmare. Is there anything interesting about nightmare? Is that mare-like horse? There’s like the idea of like an incubus horse that attacked people. Chris Williamson But I’m not sure if that’s the what the a germanic demon yeah it was a mare that sat on sleeper’s chest yeah so it was a horse yes okay but it was the mare came from a germanic demon so mare was A germanic so it might have actually been a demon in the night a demon that then became the name for a horse and the night horse Wow. Adam Aleksic No, I have to look into the mirror thing. That’s fascinating. Chris Williamson Goodbye. Would God be with you? Penguin. Why does the word penguin probably mean white head, even though penguins don’t have white heads? Adam Aleksic I don’t know penguin. Please educate me. Chris Williamson Okay. Adam Aleksic So there’s a Welsh word, which is pen, P-En g-w penguin right which looks fucking welsh as shit no way would i’ve expected that to be welsh uh i mean like it’s a weird ass word i believe and Chris Williamson It originally referred to the great orc it’s it wasn’t referring to penguins yeah but it obviously got repurposed um orange uh well it comes from the sanskrit word for orange tree but Adam Aleksic It moved through um like arabic naranja same as like the spanish word um and then uh i think people kept saying n orange and the n got cut off because it turned into like a a norange versus Chris Williamson N orange yes dude you won whatever the fuck that was you won you won yeah yeah yeah a noran right to an orange yeah bro unbelievable yeah i um look from between you and mark uh forsyth it is So fucking fun you must have so much fun doing this stuff. I think it’s great. I got into etymology for the fun facts. (Time 1:20:18)
Adam Aleksic Went Viral With A Dolphin Language
- Adam Aleksic’s first viral hit came from presenting a constructed dolphin language built around whistles and clicks.
- He used conlanging at MIT to explore how different sound systems could encode reality beyond normal human speech. Transcript: Adam Aleksic Anyway, I dabbled in conlanging first in… What, what? Conlanging, which is constructed language creation. Chris Williamson Okay, thank you. Adam Aleksic Sorry. And then I studied linguistics in college, and I took a conlanging class at MIT, actually. That kind of got me into it. But I was sort of dabbling before that. For the conlanging class… Conlanging dabbler. Yeah, I’ve dabbled. And then a little more professionally, for the conlanging class at MIT, I built a dolphin language. And that was my first moment going viral on TikTok was me presenting my dolphin language where like the word for shark, for example, is. Whistles and clicks. And that’s kind of cool to play around with the phonological format. So I played around with a lot of other animal languages. I made a bird language that’s just whistled. There are actual whistled registers of languages. (Time 1:25:43)
Language Exists For Bonding Not Just Efficiency
- Language is not just an efficient information channel because rituals like small talk and saying goodbye create social bonds.
- Adam Aleksic says hyper-efficient languages fail for humans because speech must remain usable for connection, not only compression. Transcript: Adam Aleksic Big flaw of how people talk about language. And that’s how the algorithms want you to talk about language, that it’s just information bits transferred for a second and that there’s a certain amount of information that’s communicated. That’s the goal of language to just get information across. That’s something that can now be categorized and commodified. I think language is also this ritualistic bonding thing between people. Small talk, for example, like when you say the goodbye at the end of a phone call, why are you doing that? You’re not communicating anything. You could just hang up. I’m going to go. I’m going to. All my phone calls are going to be done movie style now. All right. Pink. But you do it because it helps establish social ties with the other person. And that’s kind of a beautiful thing. Courtesy. Chris Williamson Yeah. Adam Aleksic You’re building this thing with another person. And there is an element of humanity in the small talk and in the saying goodbye at the end of the phone call, which may be not good for an algorithm. Maybe you don’t like end an algorithmic video by saying goodbye, whatever. But it does add something importantly human to communication. Anyway, that being said, I think what you were getting at is can different languages have different information transferred? As humans, we have a certain maybe capacity for processing information and what’s funny is that even a language like Japanese has way more syllables per second than Tai and yet they Will still transfer about the same bits per second as each other because Tai is a more inflectional language as I mentioned they like have more tones, they build on the individual syllable More, and Japan is more likely to add syllables. But at the end of the day, they’ll speak slowly in Thai and they’ll drag out their word more, but they’re saying the exact same thing that a Japanese speaker is saying with three syllables. Chris Williamson Unbelievable. I wonder what it would be like to try and design a very efficient language. It’d be so interesting to hear how can we communicate the most content in the smallest number of syllables or words. Adam Aleksic Yeah, I mentioned this language, Ithquil, which is a hypothesized conlang. And conlangs are great for really just exploring the boundaries of what language could be. And that’s kind of what I was trying to say with the dolphin thing. You can just explore the sounds. Sorry, digression. Ithquil is a language that creates like the most information transferred. And it’s like a highly dense language carrying many different meanings. And it’s impossible for a human to learn. I mean, no native speakers of Ithquil exist because at the end of the day, we are humans using language to connect with other humans. And we’re using it in a way that we can understand and describe our reality. And that’s how it works. I’m sure you can create a robot language that works more efficiently. (Time 1:29:30)
AI Produces A Mathematical Imitation Of Speech
- Large language models do not really speak English; they convert text into tokens, numbers, and embeddings before predicting outputs.
- Adam Aleksic says meaning can warp during that pipeline, producing a statistical imitation that sounds human without matching any actual speaker. Transcript: Adam Aleksic Sure about that either, but it is true that computers do not think about language in the way we do. In fact, I would be very hesitant to say Chachypte even speaks English rather than it’s just predicting tokens based on a statistical model of what English should be. What it’s actually doing is when you input something in English, it converts those words into tokens, which is like a segment of the word. So it breaks up the words in the smaller parts, pairs those parts with numbers. These numbers turn into like coordinates, kind of like on a Cartesian plane, like X, Y axis, but like way more dimensions. So X, Y, Z to like thousands of dimensions. Then it ends up as like a data point called an embedding. And this embedding is like the representation of what you said, right? And then that gets processed through these neural networks and they figure out through previous learning things and previous ways they’ve understood embeddings, how they can predict The next token output. So then they create an output token, and then that’s translated back into language. And so all this is happening between you saying something and ChatGPT responding with something. I think that’s very important to understand because there’s a huge misconception that it’s speaking English. Along the whole way that I spoke about language getting broken down, turned into numbers, broken back up into these tokens, and then turned back into language, a of meaning can get lost And that’s where something like delve could get overrepresented that’s where something could happen where our natural way of speaking gets improperly encoded the training process Does not work correctly and then it ends up speaking this misaligned version of language I wonder what’s going to happen. Chris Williamson I wonder what the next few years are going to have in store for language because you have got bigger influences and bigger broadcasts than ever before. So is this, would you say that this is going to be the time in human history where language is potentially going to change the most rapidly? Adam Aleksic I think so. I think it’s a hard thing to measure what it even is for a language to change because as I mentioned, I don’t even know what language is. So if I’m starting with my research question, realistically, no, we don’t know what language is. It’s all made up. And because of the thing I mentioned where everybody speaks their own kind of version of language and the thing that we call a language is really just this weird spectrum of people talking That sounds similar to each other. And it’s like, where do you draw the category here? Of course, Chachi Patee is trained on a corpus of the English language, which is made up in the same way Gen Z is made up. It’s like a category that we think is a thing. And then that category is this weird homogenized thing already that there is an English language. There’s a way you speak and a way I speak that are slightly different from each other and that we can find this shared reality between ourselves. But then when our collective shared reality is fed into the chat bot that then creates its own reality based on the shared reality and outputs is what we end up with is just something that’s Not really a way that you speak. It’s not a way that I speak. It’s not a way that anybody speaks. (Time 1:32:10)