It's an absolute honor that Bored Panda was able to get in touch with Tony Thorne (as an English philologist, I'm fangirling inside), who is a leading authority on language change and language usage in the UK and the English-speaking world.
In 1994, he founded the Slang and New Language Archive at King’s College London (which he still curates to this day) and has spent over three decades writing, teaching, and broadcasting about new language and linguistic and cultural change.
He specializes in slang, jargon, and cultural history and has even compiled dictionaries, like his Dictionary of Contemporary Slang published in 2014. So, there's probably no one more suitable than Thorne to discuss Internet slang with.
First, we were curious to find out why new Internet slang emerges so frequently. So frequently, in fact, that even I (a true Gen Z that should be fluent in Internet slang) find it hard to keep up with it.
"In the past, slang took time to break out from its tight-knit local social group ('in-group' or 'peer group': a group of friends, a g**g, fellow workers, etc.) into the wider world, spreading through word of mouth before the media picked it up. Today slang's reach is massively amplified by messaging and the internet, meaning new words can go viral overnight, leaping from TikTok, YouTube, Instagram right across the 'anglosphere' and go global," he explains.
Thorne tells us that he's trying to track such emergence of slang constantly. "One of the latest terms I've come across is 'mogging,' meaning outshining, overshadowing someone, or dominating them by being more attractive than them. It's a key term in the competitive world of 'looksmaxxing' (self-enhancement)."
While Thorne says that terms like 'mogging' and 'looksmaxxing' act as important bonding mechanisms and markers of identity for younger people, older generations or even older adults tend to look at them suspiciously even though they use their own slang but may not celebrate it or attract attention to it.
"Parents, teachers and 'authority figures' generally start by 'dissing' younger people's exotic and alien-seeming language and avoiding or ignoring it or trying to ban it. But if a term is adopted by the media ('chill out' and 'woke' are examples), they may, in a few cases, start to use it themselves. Technological terms ('spam', 'troll' etc.) and lifestyle jargon may be invented or used by older speakers," he says.
Thorne believes that older generations should try to somewhat keep up with how young people are behaving and communicating online.
"I think it's important to understand changes in popular culture, in aesthetics and fashion in lifestyles, attitudes and behaviours, especially online behaviour. It's also important for older generations to keep in touch with what younger people are thinking and feeling - and vice versa," he says.
"Of course, it's not practicable for older people to keep track of all the younger generations' output - and I always tell parents and teachers not to try to use those terms and embarrass themselves in front of the kids."
Even though Thorne tries to analyze and record new language emerging online, there's still a lot that he misses or finds to be confusing.
"Much 'brain rot' slang is designed to be absurd, frivolous, if not meaningless (words like 'skibidi' for example, images like the crude cartoonish 'blobslop' postings on social media), other terms like 'aura', 'lore' in the way they are used now are hard to define, so although I record it and try to analyse it, there's a lot that I miss or probably misunderstand."
