In this bonus segment with the Etymology Nerd, Adam Aleksic, we look at the ever-changing nature of language. We include how the meaning of "preppy" has shifted, the cultural concept of "teenager," and creative ways non-alphabetic languages convey shouting online. We also look at the unexpected association between chairs and power, and a new exclamatory particle in English.
In this bonus segment with the Etymology Nerd, Adam Aleksic, we look at the ever-changing nature of language. We include how the meaning of "preppy" has shifted, the cultural concept of "teenager," and creative ways non-alphabetic languages convey shouting online. We also look at the unexpected association between chairs and power, and a new exclamatory particle in English.
Adam Aleksic - The Etymology Nerd
Adam's book - "Algospeak"
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[Computer-generated transcript]
Mignon: Greetings, Grammarpaloozians. We're here today with Adam Aleksic. We talked in the main episode about all the cool things about the algorithm from his book “Algospeak,” which is great. But now we're gonna dig into the etymology nerd side of his work. He makes videos under the handle EtymologyNerd on all the platforms. Adam, thanks for being here.
Hello. So, gosh, let's start first. You blew my mind telling me that preppy doesn't mean what it did when I was growing up.
Adam: Oh yeah. Wow. I almost didn't believe it when it came up in my research. I had to text my 11-year-old cousin and ask her, what does the word preppy mean to you? Because probably to me and you, it's like this academic style. It's like Brooks Brothers, Ralph Lauren, whatever.
Mignon: Yeah. Flipped up collars. Yeah.
Adam: If you ask a middle school girl today what the word preppy means, they'll tell you it's bright pink maximalist clothing, like with smiley faces and flowers. That's preppy now.
Mignon: Wow.
Adam: I was confused at this and had to do research, of course. So I kind of tracked a bunch of different preppy accounts on social media and was trying to see what's going on here. I actually talked to the owner of a boutique in New York City about how they're using this word, how they're using this word. So part of the evolution here is that it's normal semantic change, right? So preppy started out with these high-end retailers and then it started being used by other stores, kind of targeting middle-class, maybe younger demographics. So you have, like, Abercrombie and Fitch and Hollister marketing preppy clothing towards middle school girls. Eventually, the word preppy becomes synonymous with what middle school girls like to wear, which is bright pink clothing with flowers on it. And so the word preppy can change naturally, but I think every word change is now compounded by social media, and there are social media accounts devoted to cultivating this preppy aesthetic. The store owner I talked to also only knew the old definition like I did, but she saw that some people online were using the word preppy this way. So she rebranded. She released a new product line. She started using the word preppy multiple times in each video, used different hashtags like #preppy, and talked about the preppiest items in her store. And now if you search up, you know, preppy boutiques in New York City,Cutting Crop is the name, it'll be the top result for sure. Because it's SEO and algorithmic optimization, and words can just change definition, but the algorithm is the only thing that cares. And so if you're using the word how the algorithm wants it to be used, it doesn't, you know, the meaning is changing regardless.
Mignon: Right. It'll show whatever kind of clothes as long as you're using the word the way they're expecting it to be used. Amazing. It's so fascinating. I mean, language change is compounded by the algorithm. I mean, obviously like kids have always been the drivers of language change, and then the algorithm amplifies that, and then businesses pick it up.
It's amazing. So another thing that jumped out, there were a couple of really interesting examples in your videos about, like, cultural differences between language use. So like how the concept of a teenager, like, isn't the same in every culture because the language is different.
Adam: Oh, right. Well, "teen" is just because we have 11, 12, 13, 14. In Serbian, I think it's "ja." So it's all nice starting with 11. I think they just borrow the English word "teenager," but in Polish they'll have a similar structure and they'll use the word "nos," which is just somebody who's 11 through 19. And it's purely because how we create the category is now affecting our perception and then also how we act towards these people. We have stereotypes about teenagers that are different than our stereotypes about tweens, but Polish people like lump them all together. And I do think like language somewhat influences our perception and how we act toward reality. And that's a really cool example. I also, when we're talking about algorithms in the main episode, we were talking about how by labeling an in-group, you actually bring into existence this identity. And so once you label someone as cottagecore, goblincore, they're more likely to behave like a cottagecore person. Yeah, affect theory. It's very cool.
Mignon: And then, you know, in English when we want to show we're shouting or screaming on the internet, we'll type in all caps. But you pointed out like not every language has capital letters, but they still want to show that element of like screaming or yelling on the internet, and so they found different ways to do it.
Adam: Yeah, that's a fun one. The Japanese, for example, will switch alphabets. Chinese might space out the characters or put an exclamation point after each character. But yeah, there's always a way to transmit the vibe of what we're saying. We're very inventive as humans and even when we're shouting, like there's different ways we can shout. We can shout in SpongeBob caps where we vary the letters, we can shout with an emoji at the end or an exclamation point at the end, or we're very creative with getting our point across.
And that, I think it speaks to the tenacity of the human willingness to communicate.
Mignon: Yeah, I feel like SpongeBob—I’ve never heard them called that before—SpongeBob letters. When you do like upper, lower, upper, lower, upper, lower. I consider that more like almost like you're pointing out the ridiculousness of what you're trying to write about is maybe loudly.
Adam: Right. It's a little ironic. I call it SpongeBob letters because it was popular in SpongeBob memes in like the 2015s. But yeah, like it's a slightly different nuanced vibe of communication. That's how it works. We'll find slight differences and then modify what we're saying based on our perception of what's happening.
Mignon: Yeah. Okay. Here's another one of your videos that captivated me and just kind of blew my mind. So we have the keyboard, we have the query keyboard that we type on, and you had a video that said that people view words that you type with the letters on the right-hand side of the keyboard more positively than words that you type on the left-hand side of the keyboard, and like, what the heck? What is going on with that?
Adam: Well, that's still like, again, categories affecting our perception here. I think the studies are still coming out on that. And there's influence from different keyboards that are showing, like we think differently towards words with like the QWERTY keyboard. But part of it is we have this long-running perception that the right is better. We have words like "dextrous," meaning on the right, where the word "sinister" means on the left, or the word "gosh" is also on the left. So left is usually bad, and the right is usually good. That's why we'll say, you know, "you're right," "you're correct." And that's a normal human thing because most of us are right-handed, and maybe, maybe because the letters on the right side of the keyboard, maybe we like them more. It's hard to tell 'cause there could be other confounding things, but there, yeah, we do tend to think more positively about those right-side letters.
Mignon: Yeah, that was just wild. I couldn't believe that. And so, and another one, okay, so I mean, it's funny in some ways, like talking to you has made me so self-conscious about the way I'm speaking, and, but—
Adam: You can't turn it off. Yeah.
Mignon: You can't! Just like when I talked to Lauren Gawne about gestures and suddenly I was thinking all about my hands. But you talked about how by having better conversations, you have to give people better doorknobs. And so like, am I giving you enough doorknobs?
Adam: You are doing great. You're throwing out affordances is what it's called in psychology, and I, when I said that, I was quoting this wonderful essay by Adam Mastri that I highly recommend everybody read. But there are ways to have better conversations where you pepper them with little hooks to jump off of. If you can say something plain or you can just throw out a bunch of stuff and then hopefully one of those things will land.
I don't know if there's something there for you.
Mignon: What else? So, oh, the real, another really interesting video was about chairs. So, first of all, I never thought about the fact that we haven't had chairs for all that long, at least not comfortable chairs. And then how chairs became associated with power and all the different words. So if you go through some of the chair words and how they're associated with power, that was really interesting.
Adam: Yeah. Again, our environment shaping our perception. If you have a chair with a back, that'll change how you act and behave relative to if you didn't have a chair with a back. And we actually didn't have really common backed chairs in pretty much any culture until like the 14th century.
They were usually reserved for positions of high power, and other people would sit on stools or benches, just sit on the ground, and a lot of Eastern cultures still sit on the ground. And right, so we have all this built-up language, like chairman, chair of the board, department chair, even like a seat at the table.
Like when the Pope died, it was a setti, which means empty chair. The word cathedral is like a chair. That's what the word means in Latin. And the Holy Sea actually means the holy chair in Latin. So, like, chairs are clearly kind of tied to power in our heads, and you can see this if you, like, you know, you sit at the head of the table.
It's a more powerful position. And the way we comport our bodies around space has like huge downstream effects on like power relations and how we relate to one another. Crazy stuff, and I think we should be thinking more about our actual environments when we're talking.
Mignon: Amazing. Yeah. And then I think the last one I want to do before we get to your book recommendations, you talked about how young white women, and other people do it too, but primarily young white women have created a new, what you said, a new form of exclamatory particle in the English language. Can you give an example of that?
Adam: Yeah, I think this was first identified by John Ward. And it's kind of like doing that, like the "uh" sound at the end. But there's also like, sometimes people end up with like a sound. You know, like young women are always the kind of incubators of language change. And that's kind of partially out of the Valley Girl accent, partially out of a floor-holding tactic like we were talking about earlier. But it's a, yeah, it's a way to say, yeah, it's specifically accommodating to a kind of statement, which is really cool.
Mignon: So there's the stop like the at the bottom, but what I haven't heard, what's the, what's the M one?
Adam: Those people will just do like a slight nasal, like at the end of their sentences sometimes just—
Mignon: like stop.
Adam: Kinda like a, like a verbal period that people are doing.
Mignon: And what does it do?
Adam: It just signals the end of an utterance, stop.
Mignon: Okay.
Adam: For, for exclamations, right? So you wouldn't say, "turn left at the stop sign," but because that's not an exclamation. But if you're like, "stop-uh," you like the additional syllable functions to mark the kind of sentence and sort of does the same thing.
Mignon: Cool. And that's a pierogi, pierogi?
Adam: Pierogi, yeah.
Mignon: This fancy—
Adam: Paragogy. Yeah.
Mignon: Paragogy!
Adam: That's what it is. Yeah.
Mignon: Not the, what is it? The other one I was—what was that? An Italian pastry. I'm getting confused. Well, okay, wonderful. Those are, I mean, if you enjoyed this, you absolutely should check out Adam's videos on TikTok and Instagram reels. He's Etymology Nerd again, and like it's just video after video after video of like fascinating linguistics and language stuff.
And now, my favorite part of the show actually is to get my guest book recommendations. Help me add to my to-be-read pile.
Adam: Well, okay. I already mentioned in the, the full-length podcast, the ology on my Mark Forth site. If you're just getting started, but it's, it's a wonderful kind of circular stroll through the English language. For other books on the internet and language, I highly recommend "Because Internet" by Gretchen McCulloch. I'm sure you've read that.
Mignon: The third guest to recommend it. It like—
Adam: I'm sure. For any audience members that haven't listened to the first two people, there's, okay, you got that. You got a lot of yellow books over there. I have another yellow book here, "Word Slut" by Amanda Montel is really good, like, kind of like feminist dive through the English language. There's, if you're into language creation, there's "The Art of Language Invention" by David Peterson, and that got me into conlanging, or "The Art of Constructing Languages." Also a great book. Really enjoyed that one. Yeah, those are like my top three immediate recommendations.
Mignon: Yeah. Are there any like, like generally we were looking more for like novels, things like that, like just pleasure reading things that you might enjoy?
Adam: I actually like barely read novels anymore. It's mostly nonfiction because I was researching a lot for the book. Does it have to be linguistics-related or just in—
Mignon: Oh, no. In fact, I'd rather it wasn't.
Adam: Oh. There's a few books that, like, you know, it, it depends on the person. You pick them up at the right point, and they change your life. For me, "On the Road" by Jack Kerouac kind of changed how I engaged in daily life. Same with "The Doors of Perception" by Aldous Huxley. Those books both kind of reframed my perspective on reality and how I engage with the world, which I think still kind of shapes who I am today. So yeah, those are really good books.
Mignon: Awesome. Great. Well, thank you so much again, Adam. Where can people find you?
Adam: Etymology nerd on, you know, all the short-form video platforms or Substack.
Mignon: Excellent. And your book is "Algospeak." Thanks so much. Thank you to the Grammarians for supporting the show, and thanks again for being here, Adam.
Adam: All right. Thank you very much.