Is our language going down the toilet? My word!

I’m no linguistic purist. My brother and I exclaim “YOLO!” (you only live once) to each other, as in, “I backed into our neighbour’s car, and we didn’t realise our insurance had expired, YOLO!” Or: “Modern life is exhausting. My brain feels like a lab rat owned by sadistic scientists with an unhealthy zeal for electricity. YOLO!”

Sometimes I’ll add “AF” to the end of a sentence in front of unsuspecting parents, such as, “I’m tired AF.” (The A stands for “as” and, yes, the F stands for what you think it does. Google it.)

Inventing words is old-school, but let’s do it with panache.Credit: Getty Images/iStock

So, no, I’m no purist. But I was feeling a little curmudgeonly upon hearing Macquarie Dictionary’s announcement that its word of the year is enshittification. This added to a list of viral internet-speak words that have topped its charts in recent years (cozzie livs, brat, menty b).

It’s either an attempt to appeal to a younger generation or a depressing reflection of our internet babel, whereby trending words are spat out haphazardly for their 15 minutes of fame, enshittifying the language, like Frankenstein creations.

Sure, enshittification is the invention of a bona fide writer, Cory Doctorow. He came up with it last year to describe what happens to social media platforms over time, which is fairly accurate. However, I’m still holding Doctorow responsible for adding to the very enshittification of our language.

I know that language is an evolving beast, and evolution can be fun. Just ask my teenage drama students, who fell into hysterical laughter when I repeated the word “skibidi”. I’m still unsure what it means, but I assume it’s some derogatory term for boring adults with health insurance.

My great aunt was fluent in Anglo-Saxon, or Old English. She would pore over ancient texts like Beowulf, unlocking their meaning, when she wasn’t slipping me a copy of Harry Potter unbeknown to my religious grandparents, who disapproved of it. I often wonder how she would feel about the development of “internet speak” as someone who spent her life immersed in ancient languages, writing academic papers with scintillating titles such as “Spatial perception and conceptions in the (re-)presenting and (re-)constructing of Old English texts”.

Would she be “skibidi-ing” and “YOLO-ing” with the rest of us, harbouring the knowledge that language is always evolving? Or would she be having a menty b (mental breakdown) in her grave?

We’ve always made up words, such as Shakespeare’s “admirable”, “zany” or “kicky-wicky” (meaning “housewife”, which never caught on, maybe stopped in its tracks by the suffragettes). And then there’s Roald Dahl’s cornucopia of absurd words such as “gobblefunk”, “trogglehumper” or “delumptious”, which also didn’t infiltrate the collective lexicon or make Macquarie Dictionary’s word of the year.

“People deliberately invent new words,” Steven Milthen writes in his book The Language Puzzle, “and may consciously change their way of speaking to forge their social and cultural identity, even if this involves more rather than less effort and makes their utterances more difficult to understand.”

And Gen Z is having a field day with it.

But there’s something so hollow and lazy about internet-speak, and I wonder if it’s because we’ve lost our sense of poetry. John Koenig, author of The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, created words to describe nuanced feelings and ways of being. Take altschmerz, which he defines as “a sense of weariness with the same old problems that you’ve always had, the same boring issues and anxieties you’ve been gnawing on for decades, which makes you want to spit them out and dig up fresher pain you might have buried in your mental backyard”. (It’s from the German alt (old) and schmerz (pain). Isn’t that more beautiful than enshittification? It’s more German, at least.

The medium is the message, and the message of the internet is viral soundbites and memes that capture our depleted attention for 15 seconds, driven by algorithms. I want words born in the minds of eccentric creatives and poets, not bored teenagers glued to their phones. Will we really yell “SLAY!” – as in, “You killed it!” Not literally – at our grandkids on the sports field? Or will it have been replaced by some other skibidi babble?

Give me Beowulf any day: that can slay. Literally.

Cherie Gilmour is a freelance writer.

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