Is meme-speak rewiring our sense of language?

In 2025, social media did its thang. It shrank the world, expanded and renamed it. Many times. The most telling changes? Those were not on platforms or formats but in vocabulary. Initially, it was ‘cringe’ if anyone other than Gen Z used them, but soon, words like ragebait, AI slop, doomscrolling, corecore, biohack, and delulu slipped out of feeds and into dinner-table conversations, media articles and even political speeches. Language is the real viral — not easily disposable, it lingers, instructs and quietly rewires how we think. 

Linguists have always insisted that language is never just a description of reality. It shaped perception then, and it does now, more than ever before. In fact, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis suggests that the very structure of language influences cognition.

However, few imagined that this principle would one day be bolstered by algorithms. Today, vocabulary changes before you can utter the letter V, and worse, boxes entire moral judgments into viral phrases. For instance, take the word ragebait. Is it not instantly framing anger as manipulation? Call something a slop, and there is no further discussion about its possible creativity, or even its intended purpose or meaning. Dangerously enough, the phrase is doing the thinking for you, what experts have come to call, smartly enough, “cognitive offloading with attitude.”

According to an ongoing study by the Pew Research Center that is tracking the migration of youth language into mainstream channels, media platforms amplify this process by prioritising short, emotionally loaded phrases (think girl math, ick). These circulate faster, and thus, because of the feedback loop they generate, the terms earn for themselves both authority and authenticity as they tumble into more and more feeds. 

Psychologist and MIT professor Sherry Turkle, in her book ‘Reclaiming Conversation’, argues that thanks to this influx of new-age words, we are now bartering depth for speed and nuance for control — a trade-off that suits social media platforms very well, thank you. Why try to understand your feelings about your work and marriage? Why try to self-examine your despair? You can just mutter the word ‘doomscrolling’ and be done with it!

Sociolinguist John McWhorter, in his seminal work ‘Words on the Move,’ warns that when Gen Z vernacular becomes mainstream, its “emotional logic” becomes viral as well.

Entire relationships, careers and even your own self-image can be rated, sneered at, or memefied. So an argument with your partner can be called ‘toxic’, and there ends the matter. Label a person ‘ick’, and the effect ripples outward. Such emotional shortcuts don’t invite conversation; they close it. 

And that word, which is not a word — 6/7 — is really just a shorthand for being almost but not quite enough. Funny in certain contexts, perhaps, but pretty brutal in its dismissiveness. Enough to make a mild, earnest person feel embarrassed for being an “almost”. Which is why McWhorter says such language casually legitimises cultural fallacies. 

Social theorist Byung-Chul Han says this is the vocabulary of burnout in his book, The Burnout Society. He examines how Internet language makes us joke our way through despair and call it self-awareness. Worryingly, these shortcuts have measurable psychological costs.

Research into doomscrolling, for example, links habitual negative-news consumption to existential anxiety and mistrust. And using the word in such an offhand manner normalises mental ill-health. 

And yet, it’s not all doom. This very language also creates solidarity. Shared terms help people articulate experiences that once felt isolating. Naming burnout, manipulation, or algorithmic fatigue can be comforting. As writer and technologist Zeynep Tufekci has noted, digital cultures can both flatten and mobilise emotion. The same shortcuts that dismiss can also help us connect.

The danger lies in forgetting that these are tools, not truths. In 2025, our feeds didn’t merely record our preferences. They shaped and are shaping who we’re becoming. And we better make a note of it before we nonchalantly dismiss them as...err...skibidi.