New Source of Euphemisms

Euphemisms. Often, they originate as a way of saying something in a way that is not considered offensive by others (people in general, religious authorities, governments). Like this example from Eleanor Stern’s article:

“Consider the rate at which words for concepts like “toilet” are replaced and euphemized: ladies’ room, lavatory, privy, W.C., washroom.”

There is even a term for it:

“In linguistics, this would be called a “replacement vocabulary”.

Or as Luke Fleming and Michael Lempert said:

“A familiar irony haunts all these efforts: proscription is, in a word, productive.” In other words, taboos drive the creation of new words.”

 

In the Age of the Internet, there’s a new driver for euphemisms as social media censors certain content. It might be because that company (Facebook, Twitter etc) is for and against certain topics. Or because society’s mood calls for that stance. Or because governments demand it.

 

But social media is just filtering by algorithms and keywords. So once people realize which words invoke the censor algo, well, they just come up with different words which won’t be on the algo’s forbidden list!

“(Some) have dubbed it “algospeak”—a reference to the peculiar way in which language develops on algorithmically-centered platforms.”

Examples include:

“In this newly conventionalized glossary of euphemisms, sex becomes seggs, and nazis are yahtzees. Kill becomes unalive. Sexual assault is S.A. Porn is corn.”

If you don’t know this new vocab, stuff on the Net won’t make any sense.

““Boycott MAC! They support unaliving watermelon people,” read a recent TikTok comment… What this means is: “Boycott MAC! They support killing Palestinians.”

 

And since people spend so much time on social media, those words leak from one social media platform to another. Take this example (from TikTok into Twitter):

“In response to a tweet asking people to share little-known Black history facts, someone has written “Martin Luther King Jr. tried to unalive himself twice before the age of 13.”

And then it takes only a short while to seep into the real, physical world:

“Teachers fret about students using TikTok euphemisms. “Student wrote “Un-alive” in an email to me,” worries one Reddit user, “I keep trying to figure out if it means what I think it means: she really truly thinks that nobody is supposed to use the word “dead” in real life??”

I doubt that’s what’s happening. Kids just learn to use the words they hear all the time – that’s how they learn, remember? But yeah, over time and the majority would shift to the algo induced vocab in the real world too. But hey, aren’t languages always evolving anyway?