Karly

There is a specific kind of joy in watching someone accidentally do linguistics in public. Not linguistics in the boring, prescriptivist, BBC Radio 4 way, but linguistics in the real way, the way language behaves when you take it out for a walk and it decides to run directly into traffic.

Okay, I KNOW I said this wasn’t turning into Bridgerton Central, but when pop culture hands you phonology on a silver platter, you take it.

A recent example, and one of my favourite microscopic internet moments of the year, is when Luke Thompson read ISTG out loud as “istiguh.” Not I S T G, not each letter in formation like the little alphabet soldiers they are, but a full phonological commitment, syllables and all, a word where there wasn’t one before.

And then, because the universe is committed to comedy, he thought ISTG stood for Instagram. Which is not the phenomenon I want to talk about today, but it’s spiritually important to the story. It is the garnish. It is the little mint leaf on the cocktail of chaos.

The linguistic thing he did, though, is genuinely gorgeous, because it reveals what happens when the brain tries to force written language into speech. Abbreviations like ISTG begin life as text. They are born online. They are typed quickly, flung into a group chat, used as emotional punctuation. They are not designed for mouths. They have no vowel plan. They were never meant to be said.

And yet the second a human tries to say them, the brain does what it always does. It improvises, and it creates structure. So ISTG becomes istiguh. This is the internet manufacturing a new spoken form in real time.

What’s happening here is the phonological equivalent of putting a cardigan on something and declaring it wearable. Try to pronounce /istg/ as one neat unit and your mouth will refuse. English does not love consonant clusters like that in the middle of a syllable, so the brain inserts vowels to make the sequence pronounceable. That insertion is called epenthesis, which is a fancy way of saying we add a sound so our mouths can cope.

You see epenthesis all over natural speech. Some people say film closer to filum, children say buhlue for blue. The impulse is the same, the system would rather add a tiny vowel than trip over a cluster and faceplant.

Once the vowels appear, the abbreviation becomes something else. It stops behaving like separate letters and starts behaving like a chunk, a unit, something you can say quickly and recognise instantly. It becomes a real little lexical item. This is the part I find most interesting, because online slang has flipped the usual direction of travel. Normally we speak first and write later, with internet language we write first and only sometimes speak later.

So a typed abbreviation becomes a spoken form, and that spoken form starts to feel like a word, and then it can migrate into your actual spoken repertoire. Not even as a joke. Not even ironically. Just there. Like lol, which is now fully naturalised. People say it with the same tonal range they would use for well. It is no longer an initialism in the mouth. It is an adverb. It is a mood. It is punctuation.

Istiguh is that, just earlier in the evolutionary process. You can still feel the text in it. It still carries the vibe of being born on a screen and sounds slightly like someone is inventing a word on the spot, because they are.

This is evidence that language is not governed by what is correct. It’s governed by what is usable, what is pronounceable, what is socially shareable, what can be repeated and recognised and laughed at and then quietly adopted.

Which is why, one day, a future linguistics student will stumble upon istiguh in some dusty archive of 2020s English and have to write a dissertation chapter that begins with a sentence like this. This lexical item appears to originate in online discourse, where a written initialism meaning I swear to God underwent epenthetic vowel insertion and subsequent lexicalisation.

And the student will be right.

But they will never know the most important part, which is that a man looked at ISTG and thought it meant Instagram, and honestly that is exactly how language evolves: confidently, incorrectly and with vibes.

ISTG.