Merriam-Webster, whose lexicographers scan in real time for new bits of language emerging, is out with one of its periodic lists of additional words. Not surprisingly, the way English is changing is a reflection of life increasingly lived online and increasingly lived to work. One new(ly official) word is “ergomania,” a fancy way to say workaholism. Additionally, we got “digital nomad,” for people who travel unendingly while working online, “co-working,” and “gig worker.” Several other additions come from the language around the reason for all of these changes in the structure of work, the coronavirus: The dictionary has added “breakthrough” (as in, “case”), “super-spreader,” and “vaccine passport.” Meanwhile, Oxford University Press, the publisher of the Oxford English Dictionary, has named “vax” its word of the year: “A relatively rare word in our corpus until this year, by September it was over 72 times more frequent than at the same time last year.”
With all of this pandemic-era online work culture spawning new language, it is no surprise that a third category of newly official words includes words from internet chat slang. Merriam-Webster has added “TBH” (to be honest), “FTW” (for the win), and “deplatform.” That last one carries two distinct definitions, one for online and one for more general attempts at this particular breed of censorship. I would like to have written the example sentences in the entry for “deplatform”: “Twitter deplatformed the New York Post on baseless suspicion of spreading Russian propaganda after it posted a story about Hunter Biden that ultimately turned out to be true,” and “MIT deplatformed a visiting lecturer for having expressed a supposedly racist opinion held by most Americans, including Americans of color, and enshrined in the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.”
Perhaps the most interesting internet-derived addition is a new sense of the word “because.” In internetspeak, you can just say something happened “because reasons,” not “because of” something. It has only been two years since the publication of Gretchen McCulloch’s book Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language. This suggests one of the biggest things that has happened “because internet” is simply that slang goes from fringe to accepted faster than ever: linguistic superspreaders.
Another new addition, this one unrelated to the internet, is the “faux-hawk,” the hairstyle in which a central ridge of hair is spiked up while the rest of the hair is slicked down (unlike in a real Mohawk that sees the sides fully shaved). This put me in mind of another group of new words released in recent weeks, an internet list of Facebook “code words” from that company’s big leak of internal data and communications to a press that’s eager to cast social media as sinister. One of Facebook’s terms is also on the Merriam-Webster list of new entries: “astroturf.” Per Business Insider, these are “groups that are initially populated by fake accounts, [sic] but become self-sustaining as real accounts become participants.” Another word on the list is “faux-tire,” a term for “material meant to misinform/push propaganda while trying to self-portray as satire to avoid classification as newsworthy.” Facebook has rebranded its corporate name as Meta, which many Israelis thought might have been satire since it means “dead” in Hebrew. #FacebookDead trended on Twitter, and Israeli emergency rescue workers joked that they were on the case. As the BBC catalogues, this kind of translation gaffe in international branding is common. Nokia once named a phone a Spanish word for prostitute, and Rolls Royce once named a model a German term for excrement. It may have seemed like satire to them — or “faux-tire.” Though, TBH, questions of rhetorical intent in language usage are probably too complex to define cleanly for the purposes of deplatforming bad speech that occurs because internet.
