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Getting the Hang of Some Internet Slang
Social media allows new terms to be tracked with precision.
Posted February 16, 2024 Reviewed by Davia Sills
Key points
- Slang expressions can become suddenly popular—and then disappear just as quickly.
- The internet provides a permanent record of such short-lived terms.
- This ephemeral aspect of language use can now be easily studied.
Every language has its stock of basic terms and concepts. In English, words like “table” and “chair” seem as fixed and unchanging as the stars in the sky. But other terms are more like comets: They suddenly appear, cast an incandescent streak across the linguistic firmament, and then vanish. These ephemeral visitors are a language’s slang terms, and thanks to the internet and social media, researchers now have unprecedented tools for studying this aspect of language evolution.
Intoxicating Language
It’s instructive to look at the slang of yesteryear to appreciate just how much English has changed over time. In 1901, a St. Louis newspaper published a list of synonyms for the state of being drunk. Many of these are still employed well over a century later (intoxicated; in one’s cups; three sheets to the wind), while others have shifted in meaning (having a bee in one’s bonnet; feeling one’s oats). But a third group of terms seems to have disappeared almost completely (more sail than ballast; all mops and brooms; full of Jersey lightning).
In general, language change is driven by its younger speakers. And in every generation, it seems, older speakers rail against newly coined terms as perversions of the pure dialect they themselves employ. (Older adults apparently forget that they were once young and luxuriated in the slang so frowned upon by their parents and grandparents.)
What has changed, however, is our ability to study these developments as they occur. Traditionally, slang has been the province of spoken language, and vast numbers of such terms, never recorded, have disappeared forever. But because so much of our communication has migrated online via social media, these ephemeral expressions are being recorded for posterity. Slang is now time-stamped, indexed, and searchable by anyone with a computer or cellphone.
Eyebrows on Fleek
As I describe in my book on communication, the career of a new expression like “on fleek” can now be described with great precision. The term, which originally referred to perfectly groomed eyebrows, was first used by 16-year-old Kayla Lewis in a six-second selfie uploaded to Vine on June 21, 2014.
The term quickly went viral, and by the fall, corporations like Taco Bell, Denny’s, and IHOP started using it in their online advertising (as in “Pancakes on fleek”). The term had expanded from grooming to denote anything that was excellent or superior—a well-known phenomenon that linguists call semantic broadening.
In January 2016, the American Dialect Society debated whether to enshrine “on fleek” as its Word of the Year for 2015, although it ended up losing out to the gene-editing technology known as CRISPR.
Despite that minor setback, the future of on fleek appeared bright. But then the expression went into long-term decline. Google Trends, which provides data on the popularity of search queries, shows that it peaked in popularity in January 2015 and has been fading ever since. (Perhaps its appropriation by advertisers made it repugnant.)
And now, nine years later, on fleek has disappeared almost entirely. It has joined other ephemera like “23 skidoo,” “groovy,” and similar terms that are employed ironically to refer to times past when such phrases were in vogue.
Where Did “OK” Come From?
That’s not to say that all slang terms end up on the ash heap of history. Some of them break out and become incredibly popular. The most successful by far is “OK,” which has become a universal means for expressing approbation. OK has been adopted into many other languages, and it may be the most widely used expression on the planet.
Without a good paper trail, however, scholars have been unable to conclusively pin down its origins. The editors of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) found it appearing in print as early as 1839. OK may have started as an initialism for the fanciful spelling “oll korrect,” but its entry in the OED allows that it could have come from Choctaw, French, Scottish English, or Wolof. Without more documentation, we may never know for certain.
Like on fleek, OK has shifted in meaning over time; it once denoted excellence but is now more commonly used to mean something that is merely acceptable. This change in magnitude typifies a linguistic phenomenon known as semantic bleaching. And like on fleek, the fate of other slang terms that have arisen during the past couple of decades can be tracked with great precision via their online usage.
Milkshake Ducks and Thirst Traps
Consider “milkshake duck,” which refers to something that is initially popular but then widely reviled as more is learned about it. Dictionary.com claims that it was first employed by an Australian cartoonist on Twitter on June 12, 2016. Google Trends reports that it enjoyed surges of popularity in 2017 and 2021 but now seems to be in terminal decline. It may soon go the way of “all mops and brooms.”
“Thirst trap,” on the other hand, has been on a steady upward march since 2013. This term, first recorded in 2011, refers to pictures or videos designed to attract online attention. It hit the big time when the editors at Merriam-Webster enshrined it in their dictionary in late 2023. Will it remain popular? Linguists will continue to track it, using mentions in social media—their favorite new toy—to monitor its health.
