Is the internet changing how we think about slang?
Tony Thorne is the resident language consultant at King’s College London and founder of the school’s Slang and New Language Archive. “When you have an accelerated society with rapid change in technology and lifestyle choices, you inevitably have to coin new language to encode these changes” . Today, TikTok, Instagram and Twitter allow new words to reach millions of ears overnight. “New expressions which might have taken years to spread or which would have disappeared eventually can be shared instantaneously”. The phenomenon is perhaps most clear on TikTok. the app has “empowered” young people to exercise a larger influence over our language. There’s a clear process at play when terms like “mid” and “understood the assignment” explode online. the words find footing on TikTok, often among younger creators. Those users drop the words in increasingly viral videos, reaching more people — and more social platforms — until the term reaches universality
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