Human civilization has definitely moved beyond the printed word — facts are facts, books are done — and now that we have established that, I wonder next if the vocabulary of the average American is contracting as a result?
It occurred to me a few weeks ago, sitting cozily in my favorite carrel among the book-smelling stacks over at the East Hampton Library, that a library isn't so much a destination where you go to borrow a novel as it is an internet cafe wrapped inside a museum of human thought. Here we sit, a community on our laptops, with colorful packages wrapped in transparent Mylar, in rows and rows all around: the collected imaginations of hundreds of thousands of authors, living and dead.
If you are a member of Generation X or a Boomer, or I guess a Millennial, too, you wear the laurels of having lived both before and after, precipitously straddling in your lifetime the pre-digital experience of life on earth and the analog experience of life on earth. And that, I.M.H.O. — to employ an outdated early-internet acronym — puts you in a position to judge for yourself whether the internet is increasing multiplicity and diversity (of words, fashions, ideas, trends) or if it's a homogenizing force.
The internet certainly seems like the great flattener-outer — the mighty sonic reducer, the synthesizer, the universal same-making force — to me, but maybe that will prove not to be true in the end, but only appear so here, in the beginning.
Internet users around the globe mirror one another, participating in the same dance crazes, mimicking the same viral mannerisms, gestures, vocal inflections. Do you know what I mean? I first became aware of this when TikTok dawned and the tweens, whether downstairs in my living room or in a kitchen in Dubai, all began to perform the Renegade, the Holy Moly Donut Shop Challenge, and the helicopter hands and butt-boost of Charli D'Amelio's "Get Busy."
This year, the teens and 20-somethings have been doing a certain gesture thing to the camera in which they sort of flap their fingers against their palm, in a TikTok-explainer hand gesture, while doing their explaining. I think this may actually come from acrylic-nail fashion and may also possibly be — yet another — appropriation of African-American culture by the white mainstream. I dunno. (Correct me if I'm wrong.) Or, for example, there is Mr. Greg, an elementary school theater teacher from New Orleans who runs a TikTok account called @gregisms (or @gregismsofficial on Instagram). Mr. Greg is the thought leader of autumn 2024 as far as vocal inflection goes. Look him up; he has 2.7 million followers on TikTok and he's actually quite funny. Once you've heard Mr. Greg of @gregisms, you start hearing his speech patterns everywhere on the internet. "Find your joy!" Mr. Greg says.
Have Americans' vocabularies increased or decreased since 2007, when the first iPhone went on sale to the public? I'm gonna guess decreased. Because we no longer read books or magazines or newspapers, of course.
Have you ever watched TikToks from Chip Leighton, the suburban dad content creator of "Texts From my College Freshman"? He is a star on social media for his curated compilations of ridiculous texts received by actual parents from their actual offspring, and his account is quite funny, too. The title of Chip Leighton's popular new humor book is a quintessential text question from an American teenager: "What Time Is Noon?" It's very now that teenagers don't recognize the word "noon," much less "ennui" or "convivial" or "vernacular."
I'm a very word-oriented person. Very, very. Very word-oriented. Which makes me a dinosaur, for sure. I'm the stegosaurus rex of word nerds. My language and speech patterns probably sound rawther pretentious or affected to the teenagers and 20-somethings of my acquaintance. But whatevs. My sentiments and opinions on commonly used words are more passionate than they should be. I can't help it. It's an occupational hazard made only more forceful by ancestral imperative, coming as I do from three generations of journalists.
I have words running through by brain even when I'm asleep. At least once a day, I become aware that a word, or compound phrase, has fallen out of the stream of consciousness inside my brainbox and become lodged in the gears, stuck there. I decided last week to make a list of these words that become stuck in the clunky gears of my cognition, alongside the ear-worm lyrics to Chappell Roan's "Hot to Go."
Here is the list of stuck words. I wrote them down: Bayswater. Hanoverian. Eukanuba. Fibonacci sequence. Demelza. Janjaweed. Phosphate. Torquay.
Most of these words that become lodged in my cogitations like this get stuck because they have some sort of euphony, a sound that appeals, while meanwhile also being not thoroughly understood by me in terms of pure definition and meaning. I don't know what a Fibonacci sequence is. I'm not sure about Eukanuba; is that dog food?
Back when I worked at Condé Nast, in the faraway gold-lamé days of the 1990s and 2000s, I was the Vogue editorial office's semiofficial word sheriff. I issued edicts and compiled lists of clichés. No one used the word "pantyhose" in those years, but I would — precisely because a word like that was out of fashion, it was more piquant, it had more savor because it had fallen from favor, so I would sneak it into print.
The bourgeoisie would say "tights" but never say "stockings," therefore I put "stockings" in Vogue. We always said "handbag" or just "bag," but would never say "pocketbook," God forbid, because it was an outer-boroughs, elderly word, a tacky taboo, but I sure as hell would.
"Pocketbook" was my donnybrook. I never did get that one past Anna Wintour.
Another popular word in that era of glossy magazine hegemony — the rhinestoned pre-millennial rush to oblivion, when the words "mani" and "pedi" had only recently entered the popular lexicon, and "denim and diamonds" and "synchronicity" — was the word "word." In some issues of Vogue magazine, it felt like half the stories I edited (written in a brisk, joshing, women's magazine voice that quickly became overfamiliar) made reference to "the F word" (fat), "the C word" (cellulite), or "the D word" (divorce).
The editor in chief asked me to stop using the word "gown." That was a good word, in my opinion. It brought to mind a debutante, a self-indulgent treacle-blonde, wriggling out of her strapless party frock of buttercup chiffon as the dawn birds chirped outside her celadon-and-peach dressing room. I did manage to slip "gown" in once or twice.
Right now, in October 2024, the Word Stegosaurus is still not a fan of the S-word that rhymes with "spit" because, as I have mentioned before in the column, if you use certain words, out of your own mouth, the stench sticks to your clothes and person.
The Word Stegosaurus is fine with the F-word.
The Word Stegosaurus would like you all to stop saying "prior to" in place of good, solid "before," and has noted the definition-creep of the trendy teen-slang term "salty."
The Word Stegosaurus chuckled out loud to learn what a "milkshake duck" was in September. (Look it up.)
And the Word Stegosaurus would like to know if the term "boffin" is considered derogatory in Great Britain. If you know the answer to that one, please drop me a line.