Rare First Edition of 'The Hobbit' Discovered

 

[Last Tuesday, 5 August, I read a really wonderful little story in the front section of the New York Times: “A ‘Hobbit’ Gem Rediscovered in England” (published on the paper’s website as “A Rare Copy of ‘The Hobbit’ Is Found on an Unassuming Shelf” on 4 August.)  As you’ll see shortly, it’s a report on the serendipitous discovery of a first edition of J. R. R. Tolkien’s initial book in the Middle Earth saga, The Hobbit.  In my 20’s, I was a Tolkien fan.  I wasn’t obsessive—I never tried to learn any of the languages Tolkien invented, for instance (which is perhaps odd, since I was a linguist)—but I loved the stories (and, 30 years later, the movies).

[I became engaged by the books sort of by happenstance.  I was in the army—this was the summer of 1971, by the way—and posted to West Berlin.  I arrived with just a suitcase of clothes and uniforms and very little else.  I was forewarned that I’d be wearing civilian clothes on duty, so I needed to bring enough suits, slacks and jackets, shirts, ties, shoes, and socks for five days so I wouldn’t have to repeat within a week of work.  (Up till then, in the 2½ years I’d been in the service, I wore a uniform, so who’d notice if I wore the same one two days in a row?)

[All my other personal effects were being shipped from home courtesy of the army, but it wasn’t an express delivery.  So, I had a radio, but no television or stereo.  If I went out, Berlin had plenty of diversions, but I’d eventually have to come back to the BOQ, even if only to turn in for the night.  (Army office hours started at 8 a.m.)  So, I stopped by the PX newsstand, which was also the bookstore, and browsed the reading material on offer.  I spotted a boxed set of the Ring Trilogy and its predecessor, The Hobbit.

[I’d heard of the saga, of course.  It was popular on the campus of my college, my last stop before the army.  But I hadn’t read any of the books yet.  So, I grabbed the four paperbacks to see what all the fuss was about—and hopefully to have something to pass the time and occupy my mind and imagination when I was off duty at home.

[Well, long story short (if it’s not already too late): I not only couldn’t put the books down, but I was sort of transported to Middle Earth in such a way that everything around me in my apartment became part of the fantasy world.  Even when I wasn’t reading the stories—even when I’d finished them (and, boy, was that a let down!)—if I heard a song that was on the radio when I was reading in bed, or if I ate a snack I’d often had while I was reading, I was flashed back to the saga.  Not literally, but emotionally or psychically: I’d feel again however I’d felt when I was immersed in the book.  

[That flashback sensation lasted for a few years; it’s gone now, perhaps unfortunately, but it stayed with me for a long time.  The only other book that did that to me was T. H. White’s The Once and Future King (1958), which I’d read—also in bed at night—when I was about 12.  (I loved the Narnia books [1950-56] and the Oz books [1900-20]—those latter [only the first three or four, I think] were actually read to us by our elementary school librarian when I was really young—but they didn’t transport me the way the Hobbit saga and little Wart’s story did.)]

“‘UNIMAGINABLY RARE’ FIRST EDITION OF 
JRR TOLKIEN’S ‘THE HOBBIT’ DISCOVERED IN U.K. HOME”
Jo Lawson-Tancred

[This account of the find was reported on artnet magazine’s website on 7 August 2025.]

In near pristine condition, the book easily surpassed estimates to fetch $57,000.

An exceptionally rare first edition of JRR Tolkein’s [1892-1973] fantasy bestseller The Hobbit [1937] was sold for £43,000 ($58,000 [or €50,000]) by a local auction house in Bristol, England, yesterday. The literary gem soared past its conservative high estimate of £12,000 ($16,000 [or €14,000]) in an online sale by Auctioneum, meeting expectations but failing to pull in one of the eye-watering sums that Tolkein’s first editions have previously commanded.

The book’s discovery would be a once-in-a-lifetime moment for any rare books specialist. While out on a routine appraisal of the contents of a home in Bristol, England, Caitlin Riley [b. ca. 1997] spotted an unusually quaint, faded green cover. As a seasoned connoisseur, she knew what she might be looking at, but surely it was too good to be true? On closer inspection, there could be little doubt that she was holding a first edition of JRR Tolkien’s masterpiece The Hobbit, in near pristine condition, no less.

“It was just a run-of-the-mill bookcase, containing the usual reading and reference books you’d expect to find,” Riley said. As she flicked through the pages, surveying a title page with no previous publication dates, the magnitude of the discovery dawned on her. “When I realized what it was, my heart began pounding. It’s an unimaginably rare find.”

Indeed, though the fantasy novel would go on to sell an estimated 100 million copies, becoming one of the best-selling books of all time, The Hobbit‘s original 1937 print run consisted of just 1,500 copies. Of these, only a few hundred are believed to remain, and since many likely once belonged to children, unsurprisingly, bear signs of wear and tear.

The book was an immediate success and its first print run was swiftly followed by a second, just a few weeks later. A key difference between these runs can be found in the illustrations, which are based on Tolkien’s originals. In the first run, the illustrations were done in black-and-white to save on costs. When it became clear the book would be a hit, they were recommissioned in color.

Coveted literary treasures like these, especially those touting the name of Tolkein [pronounced, by the way, TOLE•keen], have been known to fetch over $100,000. First editions of The Hobbit are so rare that they almost never come up for auction but, in 2015, one similar copy sold for £137,000 at Sotheby’s London. However, this sum, which converts to around $182,000 today, was partly owed to the book retaining its original dust jacket and containing Tolkien’s inscription to the recipient, one of his students, as well as four lines of handwritten Elvish.

A London book specialist, Oliver Bayliss [b. 1992], has estimated that the copy found in Bristol might sell for over £50,000 ($67,000 [or €58,000]), according to the New York Times. He only slightly overestimated the eventual sum.

Riley’s find was all the more unexpected because the house’s late owner has remained anonymous, with their estate being overseen by an executor. While specialists are not sure how The Hobbit ended up on their bookshelves, the copy can be traced to the library of celebrated botanist Hubert Priestley [Joseph Hubert Priestley (1883-1944)], who studied and lectured at University College, Bristol.

It has been speculated that Priestly may have met Tolkien via another acclaimed English author, C.S. Lewis [1898-1963; British writer, literary scholar, and lay Anglican theologian; held academic positions in English literature at both Magdalen College, Oxford (1925–1954), and Magdalene College, Cambridge (1954-63); best known as the author of The Chronicles of Narnia (1950-56)], with whom both men corresponded. Whatever the case, the various owners of this copy of The Hobbit appear not to have been avid readers. Its noticeably un-thumbed pages suggest that it may never have been read at all, or possibly by someone taking great care not to leave many traces.

[Jo Lawson-Tancred, European News Reporter, writes about news happening across the art world, including at museums, in archaeology, on the gallery scene, and emerging uses of tech in art.  In longer form, she reports on new trends in the art and museum worlds, interviewing important artists working today, or bringing to light the forgotten stories of historically marginalized artists or portrait subjects.  Her book A.I. and the Art Market was published by Lund Humphries in 2024 in the U.K. and 2025 in the U.S.]

*  *  *  *
“HOW TO IDENTIFY FIRST EDITION COPIES OF 
THE LORD OF THE RINGS AND THE HOBBIT”

[WeBuyBooks, the website of a recommerce company in the United Kingdom specializing in recycling books, CD’s, and DVD’s, published a guide to Tolkien first editions.  I’m reposting it for the edification of any ROTters who are not only Tolkien fans, but collectors.  This post was last updated on 26 March 2025.

[(Since “Rare First Edition” is about The Hobbit, not the writer’s whole Middle Earth oeuvre, I’ve truncated the WeBuyBooks posting after it covers that one book; interested readers should click on the link above to access the website and the collectors’ guide for The Lord of the Rings trilogy and The Silmarillion.  I’ve also taken the liberty of italicizing the book titles below, which the website didn’t do.  Because the post is all about books, spotlighting the titles from the other writing seems significant and useful.)]

Do you own a copy of The Lord of the Rings (first published, 1954-55)? If you do, you could be in for a surprise. In this article, we will uncover the secrets behind first-edition J.R.R. Tolkien novels to find out just how valuable they are.

Since the release of The Lord of the Rings following the successful launch of Tolkien’s first book, The Hobbit, it has seen success after success, leading to over 150,000,000 copies printed to date. We aren’t just going to be looking at your average copy of The Lord of the Rings however, we are going to be examining the true first editions and explaining how you can identify them.

We are going to be exploring some tips and tricks to help you identify what a first-edition Lord of the Rings book looks like and how to spot a fake. We will also be taking a look at first-edition copies of The Hobbit and The Silmarillion, as well as some of Tolkien’s other lesser-known titles.

So, if you have an old copy of The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, or The Silmarillion (1977), now’s the time to dig it out and see if you are unknowingly in possession of a first-edition Tolkien classic.

So, grab yourself a cuppa [for those not up on Britspeak, in the U.K., where WeBuyBooks lives, this colloquial contraction of cup of means “tea”], get comfortable, and let’s get started.

What is the difference between ‘first edition’ and ‘first printing’?

Reader’s Note: Throughout this article, we will be referring to ‘first edition’ and ‘first printing’, these are phrases that come up a lot when considering rare literature, but they both have different meanings, here’s what they mean:

First Edition: A ‘first edition’ book is a copy of the first version of the book. A second edition is a version of a book after adjustments are made to the original. These can be in the form of new artwork, corrected errors, or simply changes in the wording.

First Printing: ’First printings’ (or ‘first impressions’) are the copies of a book that are part of the first print run of an edition. For example, if a new edition of a book is released with new cover art, the first printings will be the ones that are printed first.

The size of print runs varies from book to book, it’s common to find that books written by relatively less well-known authors or books that are the first of their series have a much smaller number of first edition, first printing copies. This is due mainly to the fact that the publisher can’t guarantee the book’s success and is less willing to invest in large-scale printing straight away.

For true collectors, a first printing of a first edition is the ultimate goal as these tend to be the rarest, but later printings and editions can still hold significant value.

Before we begin, just a warning, the following content may contain some spoilers so if you haven’t already read any of the Tolkien books, continue with care.

Who was J.R.R. Tolkien?

Born in Bloemfontein, South Africa, in 1892, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, more commonly known today as J.R.R. Tolkien is best known as the author of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. Tolkien’s contributions to the high fantasy genre aren’t his only achievements however, during his professional career he was the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon history at the University of Oxford. He later took the position of Professor of English Language and Literature at the same university.

[Tolkien died in Bournemouth, Hampshire, on 2 September 1973 at the age of 81; his wife, Edith (née Bratt), had predeceased him by 21 months. He had had the name “Luthien” [sic] engraved on her tombstone at Wolvercote Cemetery, Oxford. When he was buried in the same grave, he had “Beren” added to his name.]

[The story of Lúthien and Beren recounts the love between Beren, a mortal man, and Lúthien, an immortal elf-maiden. Their forbidden love leads to Beren undertaking an impossible quest and Beren and Lúthien face numerous perils together, ultimately succeeding in their quest and proving the power of love and sacrifice. Though Beren dies after the quest, Lúthien chooses mortality to be with him (as Edith Bratt converted to Catholicism for Tolkien), and they are later restored to life. Their tale is one of enduring love and the triumph of good over evil.  It’s mentioned briefly in The Fellowship of the Ring, the first part of the trilogy, and related in full in The Silmarillion.]

The Hobbit First Edition

For the sake of chronology, we are going to start with the first of Tolkien’s published novels, The Hobbit. Being the first of Tolkien’s novels and the book that has inspired multiple modern adaptations including Peter Jackson’s [b. 1961; New Zealand filmmaker] film trilogy [Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001-03); later, the Hobbit trilogy (2012-14)] that took the same name, a first edition of The Hobbit has been valued at up to £40,000 [$54,000 or €46,000] depending on condition.

The Hobbit follows an unsuspecting hobbit (otherwise known as a halfling) of the shire on an epic adventure that takes him and his new dwarven companions on an adventure to reclaim the Lonely Mountain, the ancestral home of the dwarves.

Published on the 21st of November 1937, the first print run only consisted of 1,500 books, which sold out in just under three months. Since then, The Hobbit has sold around 100,000,000 copies worldwide, which means that the 1,500 first printings of the first editions make up around 0.0015% of all the copies in existence. The passage of time has only made them even rarer due to the inevitable disappearance and damage of some books.

When you come to identify a true first printing of a first edition The Hobbit you need to look for the following details:

• The publisher should be “George Allen & Unwin Ltd”.

• The Publication date should be 1937. [The copyright page should have no mention of subsequent impressions.]

• All of the illustrations in the book should be in black and white. After the success of the first print run, a second print run was released with coloured illustrations.

• On the inside of the back cover of the first edition dust jackets there is a mistake. Halfway down the page, the word Dodgson is spelled “Dodgeson”, including an ‘e’ where there shouldn’t be one. In most first edition copies, this ‘e’ has been crossed out by hand using black ink.

[This is in a brief comparison of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass (1871), written by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832-98), better known by his pen name, Lewis Carroll, with The Hobbit, and of Carroll/Dodgson and Tolkien as writers of fantasy stories.

[Carroll/Dodgson and Tolkien were both Oxford dons and authors. This shared Oxford connection and literary legacy led to Dodgson’s name being included in the information about Tolkien's work on the back flap of the dust jacket. In addition, there’s speculation that Dodgson, though deceased at the time of The Hobbit's publication, may have critiqued, proofed, or influenced Tolkien's early work; however, this theory lacks strong evidence, not to mention that Dodgson died when Tolkien was six, and should be considered with caution.]

. . . .

Signed Copies of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit

Copies of The Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit signed by J.R.R. Tolkien himself are scarce, so if you find yourself looking to add a signed copy to your collection you are going to need to write a big check.

Putting a value on a genuine signed copy of The Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit is difficult as the price range varies so much, but if you do manage to find one you can expect to pay anything from a few thousand for a signed copy of a later edition, to £500,000 [$672,000 or €576,000] for a complete, signed first-edition Lord of the Rings trilogy.

[The tale of the remarkable discovery reminds me a little of my search for the source of one particular quotation.  I tell the story in "Literary Detection" (3 January 2011).  

[Over the years, I have gone in search of many quotations using my dubious skills as a literary detective to track them down in a kind of documentary skip-trace.  If I came across a statement attributed to someone, and I thought I’d like to use it in something I was writing, I needed to find the actual source—or, at least, a citable one—before I could comfortably (and, really, legitimately) quote the statement myself.  That’s not a problem if the statement is documented in the book or article in which I found it.

[Sometimes, however—more often than I’d like—authors misattribute their quotations, giving the wrong originator or the wrong publication or the wrong date, or they don’t identify them at all.  Then, if I want to use the statement, I have to track down a viable source.

[In a pamphlet from a 1999 exhibit of Mexican muralist Diego Rivera’s work at the Cleveland Museum of Art was a very intriguing statement.  I knew I’d want to use it somewhere in a paper I was writing, but the pamphlet didn’t name the source of the quotation.  The Internet, my usual first step, revealed nothing.  The statement appeared numerous times on many websites, but not one gave any kind of origin for it.  The statement wasn’t listed in any dictionary of quotations I could find.

[So, off I went to search biographies of Rivera and articles by and about him that included statements he made.  Rivera, of course, is an artist much written about so his footprint is huge.  I made the rounds of the art collections in New York City libraries and searched every book and article about or by Rivera I could locate and never found the statement or anything remotely resembling it.  I even tried contacting the Rivera museum in Mexico City, but no one ever responded to my inquiry.

[I even wrote the Cleveland museum to see if anyone there knew the source of the quotation they’d used—no one did—and a reviewer of another exhibit who’d quoted the lines in her article, but she didn’t know where the statement came from, either.

[I started looking for the Rivera quotation probably around 2000 or 2001. I kept looking from time to time, doing a ‘Net search every six or eight months in the hope that something new had been posted since my last try.  Sometime in 2007, I hit on an essay in a journal that quoted the Rivera statement.  I hoped it would be documented, but I couldn’t access it from my home computer; I could only download the essay at a research library.  Finally, I got the article on a terminal at a research branch and, lo and behold, it was footnoted.  I copied down the citation for the quotation, a book about Rivera, and put in a request for it.

[Well, the only circulating copy of the book in the system turned out to have been “on trace” for months and my request was soon cancelled when the book was officially declared missing.  My only recourse now was to search the book at the non-circulating main research branch of the library, so I took myself off one subsequent afternoon. 

[En route, I passed by the lending branch that covered art and artists, where the book would have been housed if it weren’t missing.  On a whim, I decided to go up and just have a look on the shelf.  The book was sitting there, in all its glory—not out of order, not on a shelving cart, not mistakenly on the reference shelf—just where it was supposed to be shelved.  

[I had a quick look at the book right there, and there was the quotation, very clearly indented near the beginning of the text.  It was even footnoted: the source was a collection of random comments, oral and written, Rivera made to the book’s author, a friend of his and his wife, Frida Kahlo’s. 

[So I found the book and my source and could state that Rivera did actually say what's attributed to him (or as surely as a sourced publication of the words can make it).  After years of on-and-off searching.  After having looked through every book and article on or by Rivera I could locate; why I missed this one, which dated from 1971 so it wasn’t newly released or a recent acquisition by the New York Public Library, I don't know.  Nonetheless, mission (finally) accomplished.

[It was the same kind of serendipity that landed the Hobbit first edition in the hands of Auctioneum’s Caitlin Riley.  Yes, she wasn’t looking and I was, but at this point, all I was doing was periodically searching a few databases.  Then, for both of us, something valuable and important to each of us simply fell into our hands.  For both of us, I suspect, it was a lagniappe—an unexpected gift.]

"The Quest for a Lost Chinese Typewriter"

by Veronique Greenwood 

[At the end of last month, I posted a pair of articles on the new words and phrases being added to out speech, however temporarily, by Generation Alpha, drawn from their socializing on the Internet (see “New Word Coinages” [29 July 2025]).  Now here’s a slightly different language report, based more in the past than today’s use of language, and more about writing, or more precisely typing, than speaking.

[Veronique Greenwood’s piece about one man’s quest for an almost-80-year-old typewriter just intrigued me.  As it happens, I engaged in a long—though not years-long—search for something that became an obsession not unlike Thomas Mullaney’s.  In my case, it was a published letter from Tennessee Williams, and I told the tale in “A Tennessee WilliamsTreasure Hunt” (11 April 2009).

[Typewriters have been the topic of a post on Rick On Theater before.  Check out “Pearl Tytell, Matriarch of Document Sleuths (1917-2021)” (17 October 2021).  Greenwood’s article was published in the “Metropolitan” Section of the New York Times of 27 July 2025.  It was also posted on the paper’s website as “A Professor’s Hunt for the Rarest Chinese Typewriter” on 22 July 2025, updated 24 July 2025.]

A professor’s search for a machine that could produce thousands of characters.

In 2010, Tom Mullaney found himself way out in the suburbs of London. A woman there wanted to show him a Chinese typewriter. She was going to be renovating her house soon, she told him, and it needed a new home.

Dr. Mullaney [b. 1978], a professor of Chinese history at Stanford University, had spent years searching the globe for Chinese typewriters, wondrous machines capable of printing thousands of Chinese characters while remaining small enough to keep on a desk.

The typewriter, 50 pounds of metal frame and levers, was one of a dying breed. If he didn’t save it, would it wind up on a scrapheap?

It went into a suitcase and he took it back to California, where it joined a growing collection of Asian-language typing devices that he’d hunted down.

But there was one typewriter that Dr. Mullaney had little hope of ever finding: the MingKwai. Made by an eccentric Chinese linguist turned inventor living in Manhattan, the machine had mechanics that were a precursor to the systems almost everyone now uses to type in Chinese.

Only one — the prototype — was ever made.

“It was the one machine,” he said recently, “which despite all my cold-calling, all my stalking, was absolutely, 100 percent, definitely gone.”

Dr. Mullaney’s mania for clunky text appliances began in 2007, when he was preparing a talk on the disappearance of Chinese characters and found himself contemplating the disintegration of everything.

Among the vast number of characters in the Chinese language — around 100,000, by some estimates — there are hundreds that no one alive knows how to pronounce. They are written down, plain as day, in old books, but their sounds, even their meanings, have been lost.

Sitting in his office, wondering at how something seemingly immortalized in print could be forgotten, Dr. Mullaney went down a mental rabbit hole.

It would have been physically impossible to build a typing machine to include all the characters that were historically written out by hand, he thought. Some characters must have made the cut, while others were left behind. He sat back in his chair and asked himself: Could he recall ever having seen a Chinese typewriter?

Two hours later, he was lying on the floor of his office, looking at patent documents for such devices. There had been, over the last century and a half, dozens of different Chinese typewriters made. Each one was an inventor’s take on how to incorporate thousands of characters into a machine without making it unusable — a physical manifestation of their ideas about language. Never plentiful, the typewriters were now increasingly rare, gone the way of most obsolete technology.

Dr. Mullaney was fascinated.

That evening turned into months of research, which turned into years of searching, as Chinese typewriters became one of his areas of historical expertise.

He cold-called strangers and left voice mail messages for private collectors, people whom he suspected, from faint traces left on the internet, of having typewriters. He pored over Ancestry.com, looking for the next of kin of the last known owner of a particular machine. He called museums and asked, “Do you, by any chance, have a Chinese typewriter?”

Sometimes, they said yes. A private museum in Delaware happened to have a surviving IBM Chinese typewriter, of which only two or three were ever made. Someone at a Chinese Christian church in San Francisco got in touch with him to say they owned a typewriter that they were trying to get rid of. Dr. Mullaney took it off their hands.

Then there was the fellow in Northern California who had held on to two Japanese typewriters, as rare as the Chinese varieties, for some decades. “He looked at me and said, ‘Is your trunk big enough?’” Dr. Mullaney recalled. It was, just.

Dr. Mullaney took home those typewriters, and the typewriter in London and others like them, because it had begun to dawn on him that he might soon be one of the only people alive who knew what these machines were, who really understood their stories. He might be the last thing standing between these machines and oblivion.

The MingKwai [sometimes written as Ming Kwai or Mingkwai] is legendary among the handful of people who know about Chinese typewriters.

It was invented by Lin Yutang [1895-1976; see bio below], a Chinese linguist and public intellectual who had begun to worry in the 1930s that without some way to convert ink-brush characters into easily reproduced text, China would be left behind technologically — perhaps destroyed at the hands of foreign powers.

Attempts to create typing machines usually stumbled over the problem of cramming a galaxy of characters into a single machine.

Dr. Lin’s solution was an ingenious system housed in what looked like a large Western typewriter. But when you tapped the keys, something remarkable happened.

Any two keystrokes, representing pieces of characters, moved gears within the machine. In a central window, which Dr. Lin called the Magic Eye, up to eight different characters containing those pieces then appeared, and the typist could select the right one.

Dr. Lin had made it possible to type tens of thousands of characters using 72 keys. It was almost as if, Dr. Mullaney said, Dr. Lin had invented a keyboard with a single key capable of typing the entire Roman alphabet.

He named his machine MingKwai, which roughly translates to “clear and fast.”

Dr. Lin, who was then living with his wife and children on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, hired a New York machinist firm to make a prototype, at enormous cost to himself. He presented that prototype in a demonstration to executives from Remington, the typewriter manufacturer.

It was a failure. The machine malfunctioned at a crucial moment.

Dr. Lin went bankrupt and the prototype was sold to Mergenthaler Linotype, a printing company in Brooklyn.

And that, as far as Dr. Mullaney had been able to find out, was the machine’s last known location. When Mergenthaler Linotype moved offices sometime in the 1950s, the machine disappeared.

In his 2017 book, “The Chinese Typewriter,” Dr. Mullaney wrote that he believed the MingKwai had most likely ended up on a scrapheap. The right person hadn’t been there to save it, to tell its story.

This past January, Jennifer and Nelson Felix were in their home in Massapequa, N.Y., going through boxes that had been in storage since Ms. Felix’s father died in Arizona five years before. They were looking at a wooden crate sitting among the cardboard boxes. “What’s this?” Ms. Felix asked her husband.

He’d had a peek in the crate back in Arizona. Oh, he said, it’s that typewriter.

She opened it, and realized it was not a typical typewriter. The symbols on the keys looked like Chinese. Mr. Felix, who often sold and bought items on Facebook, quickly found a group called “What’s My Typewriter Worth?” and posted some photos.

Then they set it aside and moved on to other things. An hour later, Mr. Felix checked on his post.

There were hundreds of comments, many written in Chinese. People kept tagging someone named Tom.

The couple looked at each other. “Who’s Tom?”

Dr. Mullaney was in Chicago to give a talk when his phone started going off — ping, ping, ping.

The small community of people he’d encountered in his long quest were sending up digital flares, urgently trying to get his attention.

As soon as he saw the post, he knew exactly what he was looking at. It was the MingKwai.

But he didn’t rejoice. He didn’t sigh with relief. He was gripped with fear.

What if they didn’t know what they had and sold it before he could get to it?

Someone could buy it with a click on eBay. They could make it into a coffee table. Take it apart and make steampunk earrings. It would be gone, just like that.

He posted a comment on Facebook, asking the poster to contact him right away. After a few frantic hours, he got a reply, and the next day he and the Felixes were on the phone.

He told them the MingKwai’s story. He said that while it was up to them what they did with it, he hoped they would consider selling it to a museum. He was afraid that if it were sold at auction, it would disappear, a trophy hidden in the vacation home of an oil tycoon.

Ms. Felix was bewildered by what was happening. It was just a typewriter in a basement.

But Dr. Mullaney had made an impression. “It was lost for half a century,” she said. “We didn’t want it to get lost again.”

“To me it’s just a typewriter,” she continued. “But to other people it’s history; it’s a story, a life, a treasure.”

Dr. Mullaney figured out that Ms. Felix’s grandfather, Douglas Arthur Jung, had been a machinist at Mergenthaler Linotype. It’s likely that when the company moved offices, he took the machine home.

Then it was passed down to Ms. Felix’s father, who, for more than a decade, had kept the MingKwai with him.

“That’s what my dad decided to keep and bring across the country when they moved,” Ms. Felix said.

Why, of all he had inherited from his own father, did he hang on to this typewriter? She doesn’t know. But she feels it must have been a conscious choice: The MingKwai would not have been packed by accident. It weighs more than 50 pounds.

In April, the couple made their decision. They sold the machine for an undisclosed amount to the Stanford University Libraries, which acquired it with the help of a private donor.

This spring, the MingKwai made its way back across the country. When it was lifted out of the crate onto the floor at a Stanford warehouse, Dr. Mullaney lay down to look at it.

The history professor could see that it was full of intricate machinery, far more delicate than any other typewriter he’d seen, and he began to imagine how engineers might help him understand it — perhaps revealing what was going on in Dr. Lin’s mind in 1947 when he invented a machine he thought could rescue China. Perhaps they could even build a new one.

Lying on his stomach, Dr. Mullaney began to wonder.

[Veronique Greenwood is a freelance science writer and editor.  She’s written for the New York Times, The Atlantic, National Geographic, Pacific Standard, Time, Discover, Aeon, Popular Science, Scientific American, and many others. She writes a column about food and science for BBC Future, a website and section of the British Broadcasting Corporation that delves into a wide range of subjects, including health, technology, climate change, social trends, and psychology.

[Wikipedia has a page on the “Chinese typewriter” which includes a section on the MingKwai.  Thomas Mullaney has several books and articles on the subject of Chinese typewriters and related devices:, The Chinese Typewriter: A History (MIT Press, 2017); "90,000 Characters on 1 Keyboard," Foreign Policy (July 2018); "Meet the mystery woman who mastered IBM's 5,400-character Chinese typewriter," Fast Company (17 May 2021); The Chinese Computer: A Global History of the Information Age (MIT Press, 2024).

[At the end of the article on the Chinese typewriter, Wikipedia reports:

The Chinese typewriter was ultimately eclipsed and made redundant with the introduction of computerized word processing, pioneered by engineer and dissident Wan Runnan and his partners when they formed the Stone Emerging Industries Company in 1984 in Zhongguancun, China's "Silicon Valley".  The last Chinese typewriters were completed around 1991.]

*  *  *  *
A SHORT BIOGRAPHY OF LIN YUTANG 

[This bio-sketch is from the website Academic, drawn from the Wikipedia entry for Lin Yutang.]

Lin Yutang (October 10, 1895 – March 26, 1976) was a Chinese writer and inventor. His informal but polished style in both Chinese and English made him one of the most influential writers of his generation, and his compilations and translations of classic Chinese texts into English were bestsellers in the West.

Lin was born in the town of Banzi in Zhangzhou Fujian province in southeastern China. This mountainous region made a deep impression on his consciousness, and thereafter he would constantly consider himself a child of the mountains (in one of his books he commented that his idea of hell was a city apartment). His father was a Christian minister. His journey of faith from Christianity to Taoism and Buddhism, and back to Christianity in his later life was recorded in his book “From Pagan to Christian” (1959).

Lin studied for his bachelor’s degree at Saint John’s University in Shanghai, then received a half-scholarship to continue study for a doctoral degree at Harvard University. He later wrote that in the Widener Library he first found himself and first came alive, but he never saw a Harvard-Yale game. He left Harvard early however, moving to France and eventually to Germany, where he completed his requirements for a doctoral degree (in Chinese) at the University of Leipzig. From 1923 to 1926 he taught English literature at Peking University. On his return to the United States in 1931, he was briefly detained for inspection at Ellis Island.

Dr. Lin was very active in the popularization of classical Chinese literature in the West, as well as the general Chinese attitude towards life. He worked to formulate Gwoyeu Romatzyh a new method of romanizing the Chinese language, and created an indexing system for Chinese characters.

He was interested in mechanics. Since Chinese is a character-based rather than an alphabet-based language, with many thousands of separate characters, it has always been difficult to employ modern printing technologies. For many years it was doubted that a Chinese typewriter could be invented. Lin, however, worked on this problem for decades and eventually came up with a workable typewriter -- brought to market in the middle of the war with Japan [1937-45].

He also invented and patented several lesser inventions such as a toothbrush with toothpaste dispensing.

After 1928 he lived mainly in the United States, where his translations of Chinese texts remained popular for many years. At the behest of Pearl Buck [1892-1973; humanitarian and Nobel Prize-winning writer], he wrote “My Country and My People” (吾國与吾民，吾国与吾民) (1935) and “The Importance of Living” (生活的藝術，生活的艺术) (1937), written in English in a charming and witty style, which became bestsellers. Others include “Between Tears and Laughter” (啼笑皆非) (1943), “The Importance of Understanding” (1960, a book of translated Chinese literary passages and short pieces), “The Chinese Theory of Art” (1967), and the novels “Moment in Peking” (京華煙雲，京华烟云) (1939) and “The Vermillion Gate” (朱門，朱门) (1953), Chinese-English Dictionary of Modern Usage (當代漢英辭典，当代汉英词典) (1973).

His many works represent an attempt to bridge the cultural gap between the East and the West. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature several times in the 1970s.

His wife, Lin Tsui-feng [1936-95] was a cookbook author whose authentic recipes did a great deal to popularize the art of Chinese cookery in America. Dr. Lin wrote an introduction to one of her and their daughter Lin Hsiang Ju’s (林相如[; b. 1930]) collections of Chinese recipes. His second daughter, Lin Tai-Yi (林太乙[; 1926-2003]) was the general editor of Chinese Readers’ Digest from 1965 until her retirement in 1988.

Dr. Lin [died in British Hong Kong at the age of 80, and] was buried at his home in Yangmingshan, Taipei, Taiwan. His home has been turned into a museum, which is operated by Taipei-based Soochow University. The town of Lin’s birth, Banzi, has also preserved the original Lin home and turned it into a museum.

[The Chinese inserts embedded in this post are in the original text.  I assume they’re translations of the titles of Lin’s books and transcriptions of the Chinese names that have been romanized here.  I neither read nor speak Chinese, so I can’t attest to the accuracy of the translations/transcriptions, but rather than strip them all out, I have chosen to leave them for any reader who does read Chinese.]

New Word Coinages

 

[As many readers of Rick On Theater will already know, I’m a language geek.  I first studied Latin in 8th grade (back when there were still Romans here and there) and was so enthused that I actually chose to go to summer school and take first-year high school Latin. 

[I continued with Latin for two more years until I learned that my father was joining the U.S. Foreign Service and my brother and I would be going to Germany to live and would be going to school in Switzerland.  So, in my sophomore year, I took French (as well as Latin) and tried to teach myself German from one of those self-teaching books.

[I didn’t really get very far with one year of American high school French and the teach-yourself method was harder than I thought.  But when I arrived in Germany that summer to stay, and my dad had hired a tutor for German, I took off like a rocket.  This was neat!  Our lessons were all in German, and afterwards, I went out into the little city where we were living and explored or ran errands . . . all in German. 

[Latin had been fun, but people—people all around me—actually spoke this new language.  And little by little, so did I.  By the time I got to school in September, I was put in third-year German, though I had never had a day’s lesson before that summer.

[And now, as the school was in the Suisse Romande, the French-speaking part of Switzerland—I was near Geneva—I began to learn French, too.  Our classes were in English, but the rest of our lives were in French.  (Back home in Koblenz, my family had gotten friendly with a French army family that was also stationed there.  They had a son, Marc, who was my age and a daughter, Marion, who was my brother’s age.  We’d hang out like teens everywhere, and, while they spoke a little English and a little German, we spoke mostly French—more and more as my French improved.

[I got pretty good pretty fast.  I paid attention to what the native-speakers said and picked up the accents—both French and German—and the slang (including the scat) and the conversational expressions and the idioms, and eventually, I could almost pass for native.  (People often thought I was from some other part of the country, but they didn’t peg me for an American until I slipped up, or told them.  (I’ve told this before, in “An American Teen in Germany” and “Going to a Swiss International School.”)

[I didn’t get to the level of trilingual, but I was close.  There was even an incident, when I was with Marc at a Rhine River castle ruin where we had a German-speaking guide and were joined on the walk by an American couple and I found myself translating the guide’s German into French for Marc and into English for the couple, and then the English and French questions into German for the guide!

[This was one of those instances when the Americans thought I was a local, and they complimented me on how well I spoke English.  When I said I was American like them, they didn’t believe me at first.  Then I told them I was born in Washington and that my father was a diplomat in Koblenz, a few clicks along the river.

[One thing that fascinated me in this experience with languages I was having was in seeing how the three tongues—not just the words and phrases, but also the structures, the grammar and the syntax—resembled each other and how they were different.  As readers might know, French, German, and English are all related because they developed as branches of the same language group, the Indo-European family of languages.  (I would later go on to study Russian, which is another branch of the same group. The similarities and differences appeared there as well.)

[But I also got a kick out of learning how some totally trivial things are entirely different—like why the card game we call crazy eights, in French is huit américains (eight Americans).  And why do the French call an ‘April fool’ a poisson d’avril (April fish)?  (A German just shouts, "April, April!")  Here’s one that’s even a little insulting: what we call ‘brass knuckles’ (and the Brits call a ‘knuckle duster’), the Germans call a Schlagring, which is pretty close: ‘punch ring.’  But the French call it a poing américain—an ‘American fist’!

[When I went back to the States for college after three years of living in Europe—I would commute back and forth for two more years—I got two years advanced placement in both French and German, so I skipped all the freshman and sophomore classes and went right into junior- and senior-level courses.  Double-majoring was an obvious decision, and it also left room in my schedule for other classes I could take just for my own edification.  Among others I took, I took Russian and a course in linguistics, the scientific study of language and its structure. 

[Both those decisions, though I made them at the time just for my own pleasure and curiosity, turned out to be fortuitous.  I was an Army ROTC (Reserve Officer Training Corps) cadet and was commissioned a second lieutenant when I graduated.  I took a six-month break and was reporting for active duty in December.  This was 1969, and there was a war going on in Southeast Asia.  I was a military intelligence officer and the life expectancy of MI lieutenants in Vietnam was five minutes after deplaning.

[I reported to Fort Knox, Kentucky, for the officer’s basic course.  (MI didn’t have its own officer’s basic course at that time, so it farmed us out to larger programs, including infantry at Fort Benning and armor (that’s tanks—you know, like Patton—the modern cavalry, for you non-military types) at Knox.

[Well, the first days of our training included many tests and examinations, among them a language aptitude test.  Lo and behold! it was exactly the same as the midterm and final exam of my linguistics class at college seven or eight months earlier—not the same questions, of course, but the same kind of problems to solve.  I maxed the test!  Not just the highest score of all the test-takers, but the highest score possible.

[So, when the officer from the Pentagon who was advising us MI officers about career choices had the mass meeting with all of us, the first thing he did was call out my name.  Of course, I figured I’d done something wrong—and so did everyone else in the room.  (I didn’t know about the test score yet.)  Then he announced what I’d done and said that I had the choice of any available language class, but that if I didn’t make a selection, the army’d choose one for me.  That meant only one language course—Vietnamese—which meant only one assignment—a year in Vietnam.

[Now, there was one slot in a Russian class and everyone who wanted language training was waiting to see what I’d do because I was going to get first pick and everyone had to choose from what was left.  Of course, I was going to take the Russian course!  It was a year-long gig doing something that was, for me, like playtime.  That’s all I needed to know to make my decision, but what I didn’t reckon on, because I didn’t know until I got there, was that the Presidio of Monterey is probably the prettiest post in the U.S. Army; Monterey, California, on a bay in the Pacific Ocean, an hour or an hour-and-a-half south of San Francisco, is easily one of most gorgeous spots on this continent; and my duty would be six hours of class—three in the morning, two hours for lunch, and three hours in the afternoon—for five days a week, and few military responsibilities.  All I had to do was study Russian.  OMG!  Please, please, please don’t throw me into that briar patch!

[This was my life for 50 weeks, plus two off at Christmas/New Years.  By the end of the course, I knew I was being posted to Germany—exactly where, I didn’t know.  I got myself released from the last hour of the Russian classes to shoot over to the German department to brush up on that language, and at the end of my tour at the Defense Language Institute, I took the proficiency tests in German and French, and, of course, the Russian test came at the end of the course.  So, my record now reflected that, along with whatever other attributes I offered, I was proficient in three foreign languages: French, German, and Russian.

[From California I had to come back east for intelligence training.  They tapped me for counterintel, which was five months of training at Fort Holabird, Maryland, located in the dock area of Baltimore harbor.  The training was fine, even interesting—I was learning to be a counter-spy, how could that not be interesting—but the post sucked.  It was very old and it was closing (the Intel Center was moving out west to Fort Huachuca, Arizona, where MI would finally have its own officer’s basic programs), so the army wasn’t expending any time, effort, or funds to keep the place up.  We were the last officer class to train there and then it was being decommissioned.  (The Watergate burglars were incarcerated there in 1974, after the place had been shuttered for three years.  As I’ve said several times, they were well and truly punished being locked up at Holabird.)

[At Holabird, I got my assignment for Germany.  At first, I couldn’t believe it.  Berlin!  Not just Germany, which I already knew, but Berlin.  It was reputed to be the best assignment in Europe (maybe even the whole army), and for MI, because of its sensitivity, only the top personnel available were sent there.  Then, of course, I saw why.  Aside from anything in my personal make-up the army might have spotted, there’s no place on Earth where the U.S. had troops where facility in English, French, German, and Russian was a major asset, especially in Military Intelligence, than West Berlin.

[Unlike the rest of Germany—both of them, really, the West and the East—Berlin, because there’d been no peace treaty signed after World War II, was still under occupation.  The four post-war sectors were still occupied by troops from the wartime allies: the United States, the British, the French, and the Soviets.  We all had unfettered access to all four sectors, and we all took advantage of that provision.  On top of that, Berlin was the spy capital of Europe in those days.  There were probably more intelligence operatives of one kind or another in Berlin when I got there than anywhere except Saigon.

[So, my language acuity, my language study, my interest in languages, and the three I ended up studying, plus that remarkable piece of luck with the test at Fort Knox—not how well I did on it: that wasn’t luck, but that it was that kind of test and that I’d taken that linguistics course just before—all came together to land me in West Berlin for my last 2½ years in the army.  All because I was—am—a language geek.] 

“BAMBOOZLING ELDERS WITH TERMS ALL THEIR OWN”
by Madison Malone Kircher 

[I read the article following this one a few days ago, and decided to repost it.  Then, as I was working on it, I found the piece directly below in the New York Times of 12 November 2023 (in the “Sunday Styles” Section).  I decided to run them both.  (It turns out there are a few more articles on the subject of either Internet slang or the current cant of Generation Alpha, and you’ll find them in some of the embedded links as you go along.  Madison Malone Kircher’s article was also posted to the paper’s website as “Gen Alpha Is Here. Can You Understand Their Slang?” on 8 November.]

Are you a sigma? How much rizz do you have? And, are you going to pay that Fanum tax?

Do you know what a gyat is? What about a rizzler? And how, precisely, does one pay a Fanum tax?

Welcome to the language of Gen Alpha, the cohort [birth years 2013-24] coming up right behind Gen Z [born around 1997 to 2012]. These children of millennials [born from 1981 to 1996; also called Gen Y] have begun a generational rite of passage — employing their own slang terms and memes, and befuddling their elders in the process.

[Most people in the U.S. are familiar with the concept of social generations (as distinguished from familial generations).  I’m a member of the Baby Boom Generation, born between 1946 and 1964 (I was born at the end of 1946, 15 months after the end of World War II).  My parents were both part of the Greatest Generation, born from 1901 to 1927 (Dad in November 1918, six days before the World War I armistice; Mom in April 1923, just five months after Benito Mussolini was named prime minister of Italy and established the first modern totalitarian state in Western Europe, a preliminary step on the path to World War II).

[Generally, the span of birth years for social generations varies around 15 years, but it’s not set and different historians and writers use different dates to define generational membership.  Gen Z is the last demographic cohort—another term for ‘social generation’—to have members born in the 20th century. 

[Gen Alpha gets its name because it follows the scientific protocol of using the Greek alphabet to designate chronological order or hierarchy, and Gen Alpha is the first cohort entirely born in the 21st century and the 3rd millennium.  (Gen Beta is the projected designation for the cohort born in 2025-39.)]

Which brings us back to gyat (rhymes with “yacht,” with a hard “g” and a firm emphasis on “yat”).

“There’s no cute way to say it — it’s just a word for a big butt,” said Alta, a 13-year-old eighth grader in Pennsylvania. “If someone has a big butt, someone will say ‘gyat’ to it.”

Alta and her brother Kai, an 11-year-old sixth grader, said they had learned the word on TikTok and that it had suddenly become popular among their classmates. The internet encyclopedia Know Your Meme credits the sudden popularity of “gyat” to the Twitch livestreamer [sic] Kai Cenat. (In August, Mr. Cenat made headlines when his fans swarmed Union Square Park in Manhattan after he promised to give away gaming consoles at no cost.)

“I don’t say ‘gyat’ to people, though, unless they’re my friend,” Alta said. “And we say it to our mom.”

Several other new words have become part of this generation’s vernacular, and six members of Gen Alpha offered their decoding services for this article. (Their parents gave permission for them to be interviewed, with the agreement that their last names would not be used.) Many of the children cited a catchy parody song [this link seems to be broken, perhaps due to the controversy over TikTok; try gyatt for the rizzler by Buni | Suno] making the rounds on TikTok as a key to the slang’s rising popularity. The lyrics go like this:

Sticking out your gyat for the rizzler
You’re so skibidi
You’re so Fanum tax
I just wanna be your sigma

A rizzler is a “good person,” according to Malcolm, a 10-year-old in Washington state.

“Having rizz is when you have good game,” Alta said. “Being a rizzler is like when you’re a pro at flirting with people.” (Rizz is short for charisma.)

The word can be used as a compliment or a joke, according to Jaedyn, 12. She said that the boys at her school in New Jersey had been singing the song lately, adding that it gave her a headache.

Jaedyn added that “nobody really knows” the meaning of “skibidi.” It has entered the lexicon by way of the animated series “Skibidi Toilet,” which has racked up more than 700 million views on YouTube. A typical episode is about 15 seconds long and features a man who pops his head out of a toilet bowl and launches into a song heavy on the use of the word that gives the show its name. (It’s easier if you just watch it. Boomers might think of “Skibidi Toilet” as a 2020s answer to the animations of “Monty Python’s Flying Circus.”)

“I don’t like,” Tariq, 8, said of the series. “It creeps me out. Every time I go to the toilet, I just want to get it quick done.” Tariq, who lives in New York State and is known online as Corn Kid, said he was not familiar with the other terms.

Fanum tax refers to Fanum, a popular streamer on Twitch who regularly appears online with Mr. Cenat. When friends are eating in Fanum’s presence, he insists that they share some of their food with him. That’s the Fanum tax.

And sigma has something to do with wolves.

“Everyone in my grade, at least, says it in a way where they’re like the alpha of the pack,” Alta said. “If you’re trying to say you’re dominant and you’re the leader, you’ll call yourself ‘sigma.’”

In a TikTok video posted in October, Philip Lindsay, a special-education math teacher in Payson, Ariz., listed a few terms he had been hearing in the classroom, including Fanum tax and gyat. “Which does not mean ‘get your act together,’” Mr. Lindsay, 29, said in the video, which has since been viewed over four million times.

His students tried at first to make him believe that gyat was an acronym that stood for “go you athletic team,” he said in an interview. He recently had to explain gyat’s real meaning to a colleague whose students had convinced the teacher to display the word in the classroom.

Mr. Lindsay said the new words struck him as more “meme-like” than earlier slang terms. He added that he believed they were “driven mainly by social media, TikTok specifically.”

Gen Alpha is still being born, according to demographers. Its birth years span from 2010 to 2025, said Mark McCrindle, a generational researcher in Australia who coined the name Gen Alpha several years ago.

Online, members of Gen Z have begun to realize they are no longer the new kids on the digital block — and that Gen Alpha might be coming for them, in the same way that they had once gone after millennials.

Anthony Mai, a TikTok creator with a large following, recently posted a video of himself wearing a comically deadpan expression as the Gen Alpha-slang song played. “Gen Alpha is making their own memes now,” he wrote in a caption. “It has begun. We are the next cringe gen on the chopping block.”

Intergenerational comedy has become a staple on social media platforms, where creators dramatize the differences between age groups. Skibidi and gyat fit snugly into the memes and video shorts belonging to this subgenre.

“Whenever I think about the linguistic differences between generations, I just think, Are we really going to do this again?” said Jessica Maddox, an assistant professor of digital media at the University of Alabama. “Generational differences and divides have always been played up to some extent, even before the heyday of the internet, but social media really exacerbates them.” She cited “OK, boomer,” a retort popularized online by Gen Z in 2019, as an example.

As Gen Alpha’s slang terms make their way into the wider (read: older) world, the young people responsible for their popularity are ready to move onto what’s next.

“If millennials start saying them, we’ll be like, ‘We’re done with these now,’” Jaedyn said.

[Madison Malone Kircher is a reporter for the Times.  She writes about the internet for the Styles desk.]

*  *  *  *
 
“HE’LL TRANSLATE THE LATEST SLANG FOR YOU”
by Callie Holtermann 

[Callie Holtermann’s article on today’s neologisms from the mouths and keyboards of the latest generation to make itself felt on our culture and its verbal expression ran in the New York Times on 27 July 2025, in the “Sunday Styles” Section.  On the Times’ website, it was posted as “The Harvard-Educated Linguist Breaking Down ‘Skibidi’ and ‘Rizz’” on 12 July.]

A Harvard-educated linguist breaks down ‘skibidi,’ ‘rizz’ and other algorithm-fueled words.

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.”

[Adam Aleksic (b. 2001) is a linguist and content creator posting educational videos as the “Etymology Nerd” to an audience of over two million. As a linguistics student at Harvard College, he founded and served as president of the Harvard Undergraduate Linguistics Society. He’s discussed online language on National Public Radio, repeatedly contributed to the Washington Post, and his work has been mentioned in the New York Times, The Economist, and The Guardian. He’s lectured on language and social media at Stanford, Yale, Georgetown, and other top universities, including a TEDx talk (independent event similar to a TED Talk in presentation that can be organized by anyone who obtains a free license from TED [Technology, Entertainment, Design]) at the University of Pennsylvania. Adam is based in New York City. (from his Penguin Random House bio)]

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 [or ‘dead’] that has made its way into middle schoolers’ offline vocabulary.

These words roll off the tongue for Mr. 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” [Alfred A. Knopf, 2025], these distinctly 21st-century coinages are worthy of consideration by anyone interested in the forces that mold our shifting lexicon.

“The more I looked into it, the more I realized that algorithms are really affecting every aspect of modern language change,” Mr. Aleksic said in a recent interview, padding around the Manhattan apartment he shares with a roommate and 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” (the “supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state,” thanks to a fire hose of digital content), you, too, have had a brush with social media’s ability to incubate slang and catapult it into the offline world.

Mr. 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 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 [see article posted above].

[William Sanford Nye (b. 1955) is a science communicator, television presenter, and former mechanical engineer known universally as “Bill Nye the Science Guy” (for his like-titled TV show [1993-99; Public Broadcasting Service and syndication]).]

What he wants now is to be taken seriously outside of those circles. “I want to balance being a ‘ha-ha funny’ TikToker with academic credibility,” he said. “It’s a little hard to strike that balance when you are talking about ‘Skibidi Toilet’ on the internet.”

‘Rizz’: A Case Study

Mr. Aleksic settled in his living room, under the apparent surveillance of several stick-on googly eyes left over from his most recent birthday party. To the left of the entrance was a makeshift ball pit filled with orbs that resembled enormous plastic Dippin’ Dots. (He installed it as a bit, but has come to appreciate its ability to foster conversation.)

[Maybe I’m alone here, but I never heard of Dippin’ Dots, so I had to look it up. If there are others in my boat, here’s the scoop (pun intended—sorry):

[Dippin' Dots is a brand of ice cream, yogurt, sherbet, and flavored ice that comes in small, bead-shaped pieces about the size of a small pea. They’re created by flash-freezing the ice cream mix in liquid nitrogen at extremely low temperatures which prevents the formation of large ice crystals, resulting in a denser and creamier texture than regular ice cream.]

In person, he is animated but not frenetic, a click or three less intense than he appears in his videos. He is happy to lean into the persona of a fast-talking know-it-all if it means engaging people who wouldn’t otherwise spare a thought for etymology.

He started speeding up his cadence when he realized 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 Mr. 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 Mr. Aleksic, the word was popularized by the Twitch streamer Kai Cenat, whose young fans picked up the term. So did the robust ecosystem of people online who make fun of Mr. 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 Mr. Aleksic — who wanted their posts to be pushed to more viewers now had an incentive to join in.

Words have always traveled from insular communities into wider usage: Mr. 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 re-election campaign. (His nickname in full, “Old Kinderhook,” was a bit of a mouthful.)

[Martin Van Buren (1782-1862) was the 8th President of the United States, serving from 1837 to 1841. A primary founder of the Democratic Party, he served as New York's attorney general (1815-19) and U.S. senator (1821-28), then briefly as the 9th governor of New York (1829). He was from Kinderhook—hence the nickname—in the eastern part of New York, relatively close to the Massachusetts border.]

But “delulu” [noun: delusion; delusional person; adjective: delusional] and “rizz” didn’t need the eighth 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 Old Kinderhook’s 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.

Mr. 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.

Does that have to be a bad thing? Moments of linguistic upheaval, like the proliferation of “netspeak” in the early 2000s, are not always as scary as they seem, the linguist David Crystal [b. 1941; British writer, editor, lecturer, and broadcaster] argued in his 2001 book “Language and the Internet” [Cambridge University Press]. Rather, they can allow for bursts of creativity.

“The internet is Homo loquens at its best,” Professor Crystal told The New York Times in 2001. “It shows language expanding richly in all sorts of directions.”

[Homo loquens is Latin for “speaking man,” a term that highlights the uniqueness and significance of human speech and language abilities as a distinctive behavior of our species. Note, for comparison, the scientific name for our species is Homo sapiens, ‘knowing man,’ and a 1938 Dutch book by historian and cultural theorist Johan Huizinga (1872-1945) is Homo ludens, ‘playing man,’ that examines the play element in culture and society.]

An Etymology Nerd Is Born

It is easy to imagine that Mr. Aleksic might be the son of linguistics professors, or perhaps a descendant of the creator of Scrabble. In reality, he is the child of two atmospheric research scientists at the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. His mother works in air-pollution modeling, he said, and his father is “an expert in cloud physics, or something.”

Mr. Aleksic grew up in Albany, N.Y., and got interested in linguistics as a freshman in high school after reading “The Etymologicon” [Icon Books, 2011] by Mark Forsyth. He started his own blog about word origins — etymologynerd.com — which broke down one word a day, including, early on, sophomore (which shares Greek roots with “sophisticated” and “moron”).

In college, he helped found the Harvard Undergraduate Linguistics Society and majored in linguistics and government. During his final semester on campus, he began posting linguistics videos on TikTok at the suggestion of a friend. The strategy earned him millions of views as well as some critics, who gather in Reddit forums to pick apart his facts or his delivery. “I like fun facts about etymology,” one wrote. “I don’t like having them shouted at me.”

Mr. Aleksic doesn’t mind those complaints. He 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, the kinds of qualifications that abound in the linguistics publishing crowd. But youth has its upsides when it comes to the world of internet slang, said Gretchen McCulloch, the author of “Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language” [Riverhead Books, 2019].

“The tricky thing with internet linguistics is that the point at which you’re the most qualified to speak about it from personal experience is also the point at which you have the least, sort of, academic credibility,” Ms. McCulloch said in an interview.

She, too, is fascinated by how short-form video is affecting language, though she wonders which changes will be permanent and which will fade with time. Take the way that influencers often begin their videos with superlatives like “The most interesting thing about . . . [.]” Will those hyperbolic phrases bleed into other forms of communication, or will they lose their potency with overuse? There is a whole graveyard full of internet-speak — “on fleek” [‘perfectly done,’ ‘exactly right,’ ‘excellent’], you will be missed — that has fallen out of fashion.

While Mr. Aleksic wades through these big questions, he is also making time for really small ones. He is hoping to make a video about urinal conversations, which have been the subject of more academic papers than you might think. While we spoke, he pulled up his email inbox to scan through the questions that had come in from his followers. (He gets about 10 a day.)

“Somebody emailed me about the word ‘thank’ versus ‘thanks,’” he said, scrolling through a message. “You know, that’s kind of interesting.”

[Callie Holtermann reports on style and pop culture for the Times.

[There are several of other posts on language and words on Rick On Theater.  Some that might amuse you are: “Franglais,” “Short Takes: Word Origins & Other Derivations,” “‘GHOTI’” by Ben Zimmer.]