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.]