Karly

There are hundreds of thousands of words in the English language, which makes it all the more remarkable that at any given moment the internet appears to have collectively agreed to use approximately twelve of them. Everything is chic, everyone is iconic, we’re obsessed with things we discovered approximately four minutes ago, anything vaguely desirable is stunning, anything surprising is insane, and every activity imaginable can now apparently be improved by prefacing it with hot girls. Hot girls read, hot girls walk, hot girls have hobbies, hot girls go to bed early, and hot girls are evidently responsible for an extraordinary proportion of ordinary human activity.

There are eras and aesthetics, things are coded or giving, people ate, women are mother, and seemingly every noun can eventually acquire -core if enough people encounter it online. I’ve already devoted quite enough of my time to -maxxing elsewhere, so I’ll spare you another investigation into our collective desire to turn ordinary activities into optimisation projects, but it belongs to the same broader phenomenon that’s become increasingly difficult to ignore: despite having access to more written language than perhaps any generation before us, our everyday online vocabulary can feel remarkably small.

This isn’t because any of these words or constructions are inherently bad. From a linguistic perspective, many of them are actually rather interesting, because language has always changed through imitation, borrowing, semantic change and play, and slang is one of the clearest reminders that speakers are active participants in language rather than passive recipients of a fixed system. We take existing words and stretch their meanings, turn nouns into verbs, repurpose suffixes, borrow expressions from particular communities and make entirely new constructions out of familiar linguistic material, none of which signals the death of English, and I’ve very little interest in joining the centuries-long tradition of declaring that whichever generation happens to be youngest at the time is personally responsible for destroying language.

What interests me far more is the extraordinary speed with which one perfectly useful expression can become everybody’s expression, and what happens to the rest of our vocabulary when it does, because the strange thing about the current moment isn’t that we’re inventing new ways of speaking but that those new ways of speaking can become so ubiquitous, so quickly, that linguistic innovation begins to sound suspiciously like linguistic uniformity.

When did everything become chic?

Every generation has fashionable vocabulary, every social group develops expressions that signal membership, and people have always adopted words from one another, but the internet has fundamentally altered the speed and scale at which that process can happen. A word or construction can begin within a relatively small online community, travel to a few larger accounts, appear repeatedly on TikTok and Instagram, migrate into everyday conversation and eventually find itself in an email from a multinational corporation desperately trying to convince you that its summer sale is giving something, all within what feels like several business days.

Social media gives us access to an extraordinary quantity of language, but quantity doesn’t necessarily mean variety, particularly when algorithms are designed to identify the content we’re likely to engage with and give us more of it. We’re therefore often watching similar people discuss similar things using similar language, and once a phrase performs well it’s repeated, repetition produces familiarity, familiarity makes the phrase easier to retrieve, and eventually a word that once felt distinctive becomes the most obvious linguistic option available.

Take chic, a word that’s obviously existed for considerably longer than TikTok and which most of us probably encountered long before it became quite so ubiquitous online. There’s nothing wrong with describing something as chic, and sometimes something simply is chic, but once you notice how frequently the word appears, it becomes impossible not to see it everywhere: a coat is chic, a restaurant is chic, a hotel is chic, a wedding is chic, a phone case is chic, someone’s kitchen is chic, someone’s grandmother is chic, and eventually the word is doing so much work that one begins to wonder what precisely we’re asking it to communicate.

The issue isn’t that chic has somehow become incorrect through overuse, because language doesn’t work according to a quota system in which a word expires after its ten-millionth appearance on Instagram. The more interesting question is what happens when one convenient adjective begins to occupy the space that might otherwise have been filled by ten others, because something can be elegant, striking, polished, sumptuous, severe, ornate, understated, handsome, ostentatious, charming, exquisite, peculiar, gaudy, tasteful, vulgar or simply beautiful, and each of those words tells us something slightly different.

When everything we like can be described as chic, then, the problem isn’t really chic at all, but everything we’ve stopped bothering to say instead.

The problem isn’t slang, it’s sameness

It would be very easy to turn this into an argument against internet slang, and it would also be rather boring. Slang isn’t evidence that people no longer understand language, and if anything, the speed with which speakers identify patterns and create new expressions from them demonstrates an impressive degree of linguistic creativity. The productivity of constructions such as -core, for example, depends upon speakers recognising how the existing construction works and understanding that they can attach it to new lexical material while still producing something comprehensible to everybody else.

The problem, then, isn’t that people are inventing new things to say, but that increasingly enormous groups of people are saying the same new things. Expressions that might once have remained associated with a particular social group, subculture or geographical community can now become part of general internet vocabulary almost instantaneously, sometimes losing much of their original cultural context along the way, and the result is a peculiar contradiction in which language is changing incredibly quickly while simultaneously beginning to sound remarkably uniform.

There’s also the question of semantic bleaching, the process through which a word can lose some of the specificity or force of its meaning as its use expands. Iconic is perhaps one of the clearest contemporary examples, because something that’s iconic should theoretically have some relationship to being an icon, whether culturally recognisable, influential or representative enough to acquire symbolic status, while online your friend ordering chips after insisting she wasn’t hungry can now be iconic. Perhaps she is, and I’d never wish to diminish her achievement, but the broader the circumstances in which we use a word become, the less specific information that word is required to carry.

The same applies when obsessed becomes the default expression for moderate enjoyment, insane can describe almost anything mildly surprising and stunning becomes interchangeable with nice. None of these usages are linguistically illegitimate, because speakers ultimately decide what words mean through use, but they do illustrate how easily a handful of highly available words can begin to replace more precise alternatives, particularly when those words are reinforced every time we open an app.

That precision matters because a large vocabulary isn’t valuable simply because it allows us to sound clever. There’s a difference between something being strange, peculiar, eccentric, absurd and uncanny, just as there’s a difference between someone being irritated, indignant, furious, resentful and exasperated, and having access to those distinctions allows us to communicate not merely the broad category of an experience but its texture. Vocabulary isn’t decoration added to a thought once we’ve had it; very often, having the right word is what allows us to articulate the thought properly in the first place.

The words you know and the words you use

Most of us know considerably more words than we regularly use, which linguists tend to discuss in terms of receptive and productive vocabulary. Your receptive vocabulary includes the words you can recognise and understand when you encounter them, while your productive vocabulary consists of those you can comfortably retrieve and use yourself, meaning that you might understand fastidious perfectly well when you encounter it in a novel while never spontaneously thinking to use it when describing another person.

This distinction becomes particularly important when considering where vocabulary comes from, because words don’t usually enter our productive vocabulary because we sat down with a dictionary and decided to memorise twenty of them before breakfast. We acquire vocabulary through exposure and repetition, encountering a word in one context and then another until we gradually develop not only an understanding of its dictionary definition but an intuitive sense of what it does, what tends to surround it and why it communicates something that its nearest synonym doesn’t.

You might encounter fastidious in a novel, find it again months later in an essay, hear somebody use it in an interview and eventually reach a point at which the word is simply available to you. You don’t have to translate it mentally into picky or fussy, because you understand that none of those words are quite interchangeable anyway, and this is one of the things sustained reading does extraordinarily well: it repeatedly places vocabulary into meaningful contexts until language that was once merely recognisable becomes usable.

This is also where conversations about the homogenisation of language begin to intersect with the much larger and more serious conversation about literacy. It would be absurd to suggest that people using chic too often constitutes evidence of declining literacy, and equally absurd to claim that social media is single-handedly making everyone stupid, but reading habits and lexical variety are connected because reading provides sustained exposure to forms of language we might otherwise never encounter. If we’re reading less while simultaneously spending more of our linguistic lives in environments where the same expressions are repeated and rewarded, it’s at least worth asking what happens to the range of vocabulary readily available to us.

Reading gives us people who don’t sound like us

One of the most valuable things about reading widely is that it forces us into contact with individual linguistic voices. Jane Austen doesn’t sound like Virginia Woolf, Virginia Woolf doesn’t sound like E. M. Forster, and none of them sound remotely like Cervantes or Dostoevsky in translation; a newspaper doesn’t sound like a poem, a nineteenth-century novel doesn’t sound like a contemporary memoir, and a work translated from another language may contain structures and choices that feel slightly unfamiliar precisely because another linguistic system exists somewhere behind it.

That variety matters because an algorithm is exceptionally good at giving us more of what we already recognise. If we engage with one style of content, we receive more of it, and if we spend enough time within one particular online community, the same jokes, sentence structures and lexical choices recur until they begin to feel less like one possible way of expressing something and more like the natural way to express it. It’s difficult to notice linguistic homogenisation while you’re inside it because familiarity is comfortable, and the words we encounter most frequently are usually the words our brains can retrieve most easily when it’s our turn to speak or write.

Reading disrupts that familiarity because books don’t need to belong to our immediate linguistic environment. We can read someone who died two hundred years before we were born, someone writing on the other side of the world, someone whose first language isn’t ours or someone whose social environment bears almost no resemblance to our own, and for however long we spend with them, we’re exposed to vocabulary and syntax shaped by experiences other than those being fed back to us by an algorithm.

This doesn’t mean that novels are morally superior to TikTok or that every book contains more linguistic value than everything written online, because neither claim would survive very much scrutiny. It simply means that vocabulary requires varied input, and if the majority of our daily written input comes from spaces in which millions of people are consuming, reproducing and being rewarded for the same recognisable expressions, it shouldn’t particularly surprise us when our productive vocabularies begin to resemble one another.

But what does this have to do with a literacy crisis?

Quite a lot, potentially, although the relationship is more complicated than people don’t read anymore and therefore everyone has forgotten adjectives. Literacy isn’t simply the ability to decode words on a page, and conversations about declining literacy involve education, access, attention, reading comprehension and socioeconomic factors that can’t reasonably be reduced to the vocabulary people use on TikTok. At the same time, it would be strange to discuss a shrinking range of everyday vocabulary without acknowledging that reading is one of the principal ways in which we encounter language beyond the vocabulary of our immediate surroundings.

The relationship between reading and vocabulary is almost embarrassingly straightforward: reading exposes you to words. More importantly, it exposes you to words in context, repeatedly and unpredictably, which is precisely what allows vocabulary to move from something you’ve technically encountered to something you actually understand and eventually use. A person who reads across genres, periods and authors isn’t simply accumulating obscure synonyms for the sake of winning at Scrabble; they’re repeatedly encountering different ways of describing, qualifying, comparing, narrating and thinking.

This is why the literacy question interests me far more than the usual panic about whether people are reading the correct number of books per year. Reading isn’t valuable because finishing fifty novels makes somebody a better person than somebody who finishes five, and I’m deeply suspicious of anything that turns reading into another optimisation exercise anyway. What matters here is exposure, because if our reading becomes narrower while our online linguistic environment becomes increasingly repetitive, we’re reducing the number of places from which new vocabulary can enter our lives at exactly the same time as one source of vocabulary is becoming extraordinarily dominant.

We can, of course, acquire vocabulary from conversation, films, television, music, education, work and the internet itself, and some of the most interesting contemporary language is being created online rather than inside books. The argument isn’t that books possess some magical monopoly on words, but that sustained reading offers something particularly useful in an environment dominated by repetition: prolonged exposure to somebody else’s language without an algorithm constantly interrupting to show you another person who sounds remarkably similar.

So, read something

If you’ve recently found yourself reaching for the same adjective every time you describe something, there’s a remarkably simple intervention available, and it doesn’t require downloading an app that promises to teach you a new word every morning. Read fiction, essays, criticism, newspapers and poetry, including poetry you don’t entirely understand; read something published this year and something published in 1850, read a translation, read somebody from another country, read somebody eighty years older than you, read a genre you ordinarily ignore and, perhaps most importantly, read people who don’t sound like you and would never under any conceivable circumstances describe a handbag as chic.

You’ll encounter words you already know but never use, words whose meanings you’ve been vaguely pretending to know for years and words you’ve genuinely never seen before, and you’ll absorb far more than definitions along the way. You’ll encounter different rhythms, different sentence structures, different registers and entirely different ways of organising thought, some of which will disappear from your memory almost immediately, some of which will sit quietly in your receptive vocabulary for years, and a few of which will eventually become so familiar that one afternoon you’ll find yourself reaching for exasperating instead of annoying, sumptuous instead of chic or fastidious instead of picky, without remembering exactly when you learned to do so.

Perhaps this is what bothers me most about the homogenisation of online language: not that the words everybody is using are bad, silly or somehow less legitimate than the vocabulary that came before them, but that there are simply so many other words available to us. English has accumulated an absurd abundance of them across centuries, borrowing them from other languages, inventing them within communities, changing their meanings and passing them between generations, and other languages contain their own enormous lexical worlds that can enter ours through multilingualism and translation. To have access to all of that and still describe every attractive restaurant, coat, hotel room and woman on the internet with the same handful of adjectives feels less like the natural evolution of language and more like a waste of perfectly good vocabulary.

We aren’t running out of words, but we may have become very good at surrounding ourselves with the same ones, and the solution doesn’t require abandoning slang, deleting TikTok or forcing yourself to speak like a nineteenth-century novelist. It just requires giving your brain something else to work with, preferably often enough that the words you encounter elsewhere eventually become as readily available as the ones your algorithm has shown you three hundred times this week, because language is wonderfully, ridiculously enormous and it seems a shame to have all of it available to us only to keep reaching for the same twelve words.

Reading builds your vocabulary, xoxoxo.