Red-tagging, butt-dialing, deepfaking and other evolving idioms
At no other stage of English language evolution has there been such rapid growth than in the first quarter of this millennium. Generational infusion has partnered with digital advances in communication that keep us alert to verbal shifts and origination.
The following examples are listed alphabetically. We can start with the word ableism, and its modifier ableist, ushering in an acutely liberal viewpoint. Per Google, “Ableist language refers to language that assumes disabled people are inferior to nondisabled people,” while “ableist slurs are words or phrases that dehumanize people with disabilities.”
Current no-nos are words like “crippled,” “dumb,” “retarded,” “blind,” “deaf,” “idiot,” “psycho” and “insane.” For proper sensitivity, the “homeless” may be called, more realistically, the “unhoused.” In our environment, the slang terms “squatter” and “jeprox” have given way to the more polite “informal settlers.”
Many words have outlived their original meanings, or embraced other capabilities. Agency used to just mean an office or part of a corporate setup. Social science imbued it with “the ability to take action or to choose what action to take.” Agentic means being “capable of achieving outcomes independently,” while an agentic future is where AI systems, or “agents,” can act independently.
Bed rotting is to stay in bed much of the day, with snacks and gadgets, “as a voluntary retreat from activity or stress.” Brain rot is another internet slang term that “refers to the perceived negative impact on mental function resulting from excessive engagement with low-effort, unstimulating online content, such as mindlessly scrolling social media, watching endless streams of videos, or doomscrolling.” Butt-dial has come to stand for inadvertence, from the accidental use of a mobile phone. Binge, or immoderate indulgence in an activity, now often refers to prolonged video streaming.
Gaining such popularity has been cognitive dissonance, simply referring to the psychological conflict resulting from holding incongruous beliefs and attitudes simultaneously. The verb converge that meant to come together has become a brand name for corporations, internet offers, and sporting teams. Cray cray first appeared in 2001 in the Online Slang Dictionary to mean “crazy”—while ironically doubling the briefer “cray.”
Parents have only recently been alerted by the hit Netflix series Adolesence to the danger posed by dark emojis, but their use in the darknet for illicit activities have long been investigated by sophisticated law enforcement agencies. A deepfake relies on misused AI to create realistic fake news, impersonate people, or spread pernicious misinformation—much worse than how Mariteses can with occasional inadvertence. For its part, the deep state is an unauthorized power network “operating independently of a state’s political leadership (with its) own agendas and goals.” The term originated in Turkey, but other nations have developed their own varieties.
Deserve used to mean “to be worthy of,” but here it often implies a karmic downturn, as with the German schadenfreude, translating locally to “buti nga”—or the Pinoy slang “dasurv / dasurb.” Double down, other than a poker term, has come to mean to persist, even at potentially great risk. Disruptors are often credited “for questioning conventional strategies, even if it violates social norms, or threatens others.” But for every Charles Darwin, Martin Luther King, Jackson Pollock, or Steve Jobs, there may also be a Donald Trump. Drone used to be a verb, but became a noun for an unmanned aircraft, initially for positive use for photography or transport, before it became a deadly weapon of destruction.
Entitlement used to be defined as “a right to benefits specified especially by law or contract.” While it also often referred to the elite, the new millennium has attached it to a “You owe me” attitude. Often accompanied by a narcissistic personality trait, it provokes such putdowns as “No wonder your kids have a sense of entitlement.”
For fake news, see deepfake, Marites, and vloggers. Flex used to mean to bend a body part, and eventually suggested flexibility in academic or corporate programs. But Gen Xers are said to have turned it into “brag” or “show off,” to assert one’s supposed superiority, so that it now equates with arrogance.
Revived in the mid-2010s from the title of a 1944 film, gaslighting now refers to “the manipulation of someone into questioning their own perception of reality”—as a form of emotional abuse. Guardrails as a boundary feature has become a trendy metaphor among US politicians to mean “alignment with goals and objectives to help guide the decision-making process.”
Haters naturally evolved owing to socmed courage from perceived anonymity. Incel, basically a portmanteau of “involuntarily celibate,” is another term learned from Adolescence—unfortunately with misogynistic trappings. Iteration is now more favored in lieu of new version or edition, as with single malt whisky and other offerings, including computer hardware or software. It’s simply the repetition of a process in pursuit of randomness.
Narrative has become popular among non-fiction writers—as both story and speculation, in poetry, essays, speeches, or any sort of discourse. It’s further romanticized as a narrative arc, or dramatic arc, the framework for any compelling tale.
The British one-off happens only once, savoring no repeat, while the onesie is a one-piece jumpsuit that’s commonly the American pajama. In physics, optics is the study of attributes of light. But in terms of public perception, it refers to the appearance of a situation “as mediated via the lens, literal and metaphorical, of the media”—especially with regards politics. The trendy outlier stands apart from other members of a group, as an “outsider, iconoclast, dissenter, eccentric, original, maverick, or nonconformist.”
Phishing is a socmed scam maneuver that attempts to steal user data by masquerading as a legit entity for communication. In basketball, a point god is an exceptionally skilled point guard that ensures game-changing leadership via b-ball IQ—first applied to Chris Paul III and now also to such living legends in the making as Nikola Jokic, Luka Doncic et al. As we might blurt out here, “Don’t panic, it’s organic.” Prompt used to mean “cue” as both noun and verb. Now, strictly as a noun, the literary prompt sparks creativity among a group by way of a proffered image, word, or topic/subject cue.
A red flag is of course a danger signal, what to watch out for, to warn you of anything that may lead to discomfiture. As a form of harassment, “In the Philippines, red-tagging is the labeling of individuals or organizations as communists, subversives, or terrorists, regardless of their actual political beliefs or affiliations.”
Trending quite recently, seamless is “having no awkward transitions, interruptions, or indications of disparity”—synonymous to “flawless, excellent, perfect.” Weather reports in local TV news introduced the term shear line. It’s “a narrow zone where there is an abrupt change in the horizontal wind component parallel to this line. In the Philippines, it’s often associated with the northeast monsoon (amihan) season and can cause significant rainfall…”
A trope can be a figure of speech, metaphor, simile, or “a recurring theme or plot device in storytelling.” It has lately been adopted from literature, employed popularly in everyday language, advertising and political speeches.
We’ve known the unicorn as a mythical horse with a single spiraling horn. Now it’s come to refer to an athlete who’s supremely unique, beyond being an idol or icon. This superstar doesn’t have to wear Uniqlo, but there’s no telling if it out-GOATs the GOAT. Oh, but the sexual meaning of a unicorn is “someone who engages in sexual activity with a couple but does not participate in other aspects of the relationship.” And in the world of finance, unicorns are startups whose valuations exceed $1 billion. Hmm, they’re not so unique after all.
A vacation has become a vacay (with the variant “staycation”), while some darned vloggers are said to have been weaponized for blackprop. They’re not exactly part of the expanding realm of the woke—a word that’s still not entirely accepted for its meaning as a noun—now defined as “aware of important issues of racial and social justice.” Alternatives had to be brought in: wokeness and wokeism. Words create other words.
