My First Book, page 9
Health Goth
Seapunk
Coquette
Tomato girl microaesthetic
Quirky reached its peak when I was in seventh grade. Everything I thought was cool could be found at the same store, and if it wasn’t there this week it would be the next. Manufacturing speeds accelerated and matched the growth and emergence of trends. But millennials fought back. Individuality felt like their God-given consolation prize, their post-soccer-game orange slice time, a part of life that could not be erased, but it was. There was New Girl and Moonrise Kingdom and pop-punk. Trends went viral. Nothing belonged to anyone. Individuality was stripped of its rite of passage status. The only forms of revolt were a complete rejection of quirk, normcore—“an anti-aspirational attitude, a capitalization of the possibility of misinterpretation”—or an embrace of trends, signifiers, and clothing that were too controversial or aesthetically unappealing to be mass-produced. Eventually these forms of revolt became quirks themselves and the quirks ended up at Urban Outfitters, near the Ramones T-shirts and the ripped sweaters.
If ugly can become beautiful and the 90s have been cool since the 90s and girls born in the year 2000 dress just like the pop stars who topped the charts on the day they popped out, then nothing will ever be able to go anywhere. If we exist within boundaries, we cannot push them. That is why certain members of Gen Z have embraced them on Musical.ly. They all lip-synch to whatever song is trending and perform identical little rituals and dances to go along, to not be alone. This is why other members spend hours in chat rooms looking for the group that best matches their niche ideology: feminist libertarians, monarchists, queer ecosocialists, young Hegelians, transfascists. As Gen Z comes of age, we find the packs within the packs. An embrace of the pack, a drive to follow and fit in, to let go of our fetishization of quirk is new. We have come so far that the act of fitting in becomes the most rebellious thing one can do. I wonder where the girls with mustache finger tattoos are now.
Rage
Rage seems to be the most important emotion of our times. Everyone is angry. If you’re not angry you’re not paying attention! It doesn’t matter whom you are angry at, you should be angry at someone. Rage is an energy, like wind in a turbine or sun on a panel or water in a wheel. If we can harness it, then maybe we can save ourselves.
Aren’t you angry? we get asked. We left you a dying earth. Shouldn’t you be doing something about it? Shouldn’t you at least be mad? I don’t think that I’ve ever felt rage.
Once, Gideon punched a wall until his knuckles bled. He laughed when I told him he was just angry because he didn’t get what he wanted. He laughed and asked me if there was any other reason to be angry at all. Rage stems from entitlement, and entitlement is not always something to be ashamed of. We are all entitled to safety and justice (whatever that means?) and probably a lot more. When these needs are not met, when they are stolen or withheld, rage seems like a very proper response. Rage seems like a means of survival. Punching a wall seems like a fine enough use of rage. It won’t save you, but it helps. Maybe one day we can get all the angry young men together who feel like something that should be theirs, always was theirs, is being taken from them. We could set them up in a field with a huge wall and they could punch it all day long and we could harvest the strength of their punches and power a town for a night or two. It wouldn’t have to be a small town. I’m sure we would have many wall-punching men driving in from across the state, to be a part of something that mattered, to use their anger for something real. If I could send them all to fight with the enemy for a year I would. I think it would be good for their rage. Their natural and primal male rage, not a symptom of toxic masculinity, just a symptom of being a man with thousands of years of knowledge on how to conquer, protect, kill, define, destroy, avenge, maim, make, smash, fix, pillage, and build buried deep at the back of their skulls. Sometimes I feel a twinge of rage, a surge of denied entitlement when I remember that I do not possess this same ancient knowledge, even though it is something I feel I deserve. The idea that I feel like I deserve something gives me another tiny twinge of what might be the first symptoms of rage.
Safe
A safe place used to be a place where you were not going to get hurt. Now a safe place is a place where you are not going to feel hurt. Feelings became facts at some point between 2016 and now. When boys are gentle I am always surprised. When the members of a space decide to call it safe they should be thanked. Everyone should be kept safe; most of us already are. The people who came before us left a dying planet, but they have decided to provide us with some safe spaces. Thank God. In these spaces I will not feel hurt. When the fires come, I know where I will be, right by the self-care station with the mandalas and the chai.
Tender
To be tender, to be vulnerable, to be understanding, to be good. Jenny Holzer put letters up on a movie marquee: “It is in your self-interest to find a way to be very tender.” Gen Z girls and gays take these words and make them the words underneath their names on Twitter and Instagram. Everyone wants to be tender. Smol beans, soft bois, tender queers, delicate flowers, a/sexual aesthetic, shy, dressed in pastel primary colors, murmuring “henlo nice 2 meet u.” Why? Tender things must be protected. We all are afraid. The world is scary. Health insurance is expiring. Maybe if we are tender, someone will protect us.
Did Jenny Holzer mean that we ourselves should be soft or that we should be gentle with others or that these things go hand in hand and those hands are called tenderness? Those are hands we should all hold. We all deserve safe spaces, places to go and be held and color in mandalas if that helps. We all must create these safe spaces in our own lives for others. We don’t need meditative coloring books. All we need is tenderness. How hard can that be? Probably very soft.
Troll
The first one was a trans internet user of Stewart Brand’s The WELL with the log-in name “Grandma”; all other trolls followed him.
Lives under bridges among the tall green grass, wearing rags, preying on travelers and innocent bearded goats.
Became a verb
In cute times, 4chan trolled a poll to send Pitbull to Alaska; in less cute times, 4chan trolled a poll to send Taylor Swift to a school for the deaf; in strange times, 4chan found Shia LaBeouf’s art project flag from its livestream’s constellations and contrails and replaced it with a Trump hat (or did he pay them off, was it a lie all along?); in scary times, 4chan is constantly filled and refilled with rape threats, ghosts, neighborhood graffiti, dark triad traits and behaviors, anime characters with souls, and twisted extremism.
Troll is one of many magic- or fairy-tale-coded words floating through the internet, along with ghost, avatar, cursed, main character, and frog. Trolls used to live in isolation under bridges, to be avoided by travelers, but now they live in basements and penthouses and suburban duplexes. A mythological troll is ugly and dirty and lives in a dark place, and its magic is dwarfed by that of its digital namesakes. Trolling (the practice, in cute times) takes one back to a childlike sense of wonder.
UwU
This isn’t a word. It’s an emoticon. It’s a feeling. It’s the face you type when “omg” or “awwwww” is not enough to convey how cute, how warm, how soft, how tender, how pure, how wholesome something is. U is an eye. W is a mouth. U is another eye. UwU is you. UwU is a string of letters that means something, the same thing to everyone who has seen it before. Doesn’t that mean it’s a word? How is it pronounced? If it is a word, what language is it in? Is it part of a language in a fetal stage, WuwWuwism? Something being built right before our eyes? Can we add new words to this language? Or is that just dumb as fuck?
It’s a new word, from an unborn language, but it already has a history and a connotation other than its original meaning. It’s unfortunately seen as creepy or cringe. The word men use when trying to appeal to teenage girls. There are entire blogs dedicated to documenting “UwU Culture,” as they call it. Every year since 2015, it has been collectively redefined. Cute. Creepy. Cringe. Cringe (furry). Always in flux, just the way language has always been, but now with hyperlinks.
Virtue
Virtue, the word, has had a rough go of it lately. It sets off sensors in the center of the deepest and oldest parts of the brain. Virtue. We have said it too much, like when we were little and we said “toy boat, toy boat, toy boat, toy boat, toy boat, toy boat, toyboat, toyboat, toyboat, toboayt, tobayat, toabyat.” Virtue is nothing but a tongue twister, a game, a competition. Who has the most? Who can show it off the best? Who is watching my virtue? Whose virtue am I watching?
Virtue signaling, as we know it in our digital and academic Gen Z circles, is the practice of showing you care, but without putting in any other work. I care, and I want you to know that I care, because maybe that will make you care about me. After every school shooting a post, #NEVERAGAIN. All black is worn to award shows. #NEVERAGAIN. Long paragraphs denounce rapists we’ve never met. A callout. Special filters on profile photos, flags of the country attacked. Loud sparkly signs. #NEVERAGAIN. As a whole, us zoomers hold such signaling in disdain, but within each is a kernel of hope. A sincere little piece of hope. A hope that it never happens again, but then of course there is an again and another again and another. A hope that somehow, something you post matters. A hope that someone cares about you. I hope that you matter.
In a few isolated churches across our nation, mostly Pentecostals, Charismatics, and other evangelicals, there still exists a tradition of snake handling. This ritual consists of holding venomous snakes and not being bitten, in order to show the other churchgoers your piety. A gentle snake is a signal of your virtue. Hundreds have died.
I wonder if we’d have as much virtue signaling as we do if posts could bite. Is the reward worth the risk? Are you pure? Do you matter? Is anyone ready to really hold the snake?
Woke
If you took the red pill you have woken up, but that’s a very different type of woke. The red pill is for the right and woke is for the left or maybe it’s the same type of awake, the type of alertness that hurts. Maybe everything has always been the same, just circles and spirals and mirrors. Sometimes being awake is painful and all you want to do is curl up in some safe space with someone’s or no one’s arms around you. When we wake up and see the world differently, start to recognize power structures, see the algorithms set up, realize our own part in it all, how do we know that we are all waking up in the same reality anymore? I live in clown world. I’ve touched both of Morpheus’s hands. I feel safe all the time. Maybe you wake up somewhere else. When I first heard the word woke, I was fifteen and on social justice Twitter. Now I hear antisemitic New World Order conspiracy theorists using it, but it means the same thing.
I shouldn’t try to speak for my generation; this is just a preliminary glossary, some words of interest, some words that have defined us and some words we have defined.
X
Every word here was once written somewhere else for the very first time, cross-bred or loaned or imagined from nothing. Right now I’m probably living before some word you can’t imagine your life without. I’d like to shout out John Milton, the English language’s most prolific neologizer and creator of more than six hundred words (including the hits lovelorn, pandemonium, and irresponsible), and to quickly note the nine most common ways words are created:
Acronym: Laser stands for “Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation,” but on the other hand, taser stands for “Tom A. Swift Electric Rifle” because Tom A. Swift was the protagonist of the inventor’s favorite childhood book series.
Affixation: Adding established prefixes or suffixes to existing words, ex. hyper+reality=hyperreality. Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest known use of the word is from around 1970. Before that I guess reality felt more real and the word was not needed.
Back-formation: Creating a new word by removing an affix from an existing word. For example, edit was created perfectly by removing the -or from editor.
Borrowing: Neologism itself is a loanword from French, borrowed in the late 1700s and never changed again.
Coinage: Inventing completely new words with little to no historical connection to existing words, no process but that of the imagination, just vibes. Coined words are often born with copyrights, but a well-coined word will escape the chains of intellectual property through genericization, the natural open sourcing of language: escalator, kerosene, google, jacuzzi, velcro, rollerblade.
Compounding: When a word combines two complete words. There’s the mundane toothpaste, teaspoon, bathtub. There’s the less obvious but still unsurprising anybody, online, yourself. There’s the sublime metaphorical sweetness of rainbow, wishbone, keepsake, cupcake, butterfly, skyscraper. Imagine being the first person who ever said butterfly or the guy who decided the building would scrape the sky. And then there are some so logical that they are lovely or so lovely that they are logical, the ones compounded in perfect flow. Words we forget could have ever been apart, like: no-thing, no-body; words we forget where to even split in two, no-where/now-where/now-here.
Portmanteau: Brunch, incel, edgelord, spam, goon, chocoholic, smog, himbo, chortle, snark, goldendoodle, and I could go on forever.
Reduplication: This word formation process, referring to semi-repeating a word within itself, feels whimsical, like baby talk. Sometimes it means a word gets repeated to signify its smaller than usual size, chitchat, pitter-patter, splish-splash. In other languages, reduplication changes definitions, but in English, it’s just for fun.
Semantic change: One of our more mystical linguistic creation processes, in which a word is imbued with a new definition but unchanged visually. It remains identical on the page and to the ear yet different in the brain, real-life alchemy. Once the literal becomes figurative, even just once, the whole word can begin to drift away from its meaning and into something new. Unlike the other linguistic neologism creation processes, this can take lifetimes. Yet it seems that sometimes these shifts and drifts from the real to the figurative and then from that figurative into our new real follow some sort of logical magic or magical logic, an imperceptibly constant motion, like the earth spinning around and around or gravity or God. The word silly started off meaning blessed, back in its Old English pre-shift definition. Then the meaning shifted from blessed into innocent through the Middle Ages’ generations of speakers, and then it became what it is. That is, you are blessed to be innocent and then you are naïve because of your innocence and finally your naïveté makes you silly.
Young
There’s a meme that goes, would you rather go crazy or go stupid? I don’t know why it always makes me laugh. Maybe I laugh just because I don’t know why. The mystery of it gets me. Being young is having a million questions while loving a mystery that will never be solved. Being young is feeling like the end is near. We have climate change. They had nuclear war. Everyone had something. For as long as we stretch forward there will always be something. Being young is going crazy and going stupid all at once. Being young is about extremes and Gen Z is so young and so extreme. Desperate times call for desperate measures. All times are desperate. Desperation is part of being human. I’m desperate to define myself and redefine myself because that is what it means to be young. Remembering that you won’t be young forever is hard when you have been young forever.
Zoomer
We are called Generation Z. Z is the last letter of the alphabet, but we will not be the last generation. It feels like that sometimes, but feelings are not always facts and some of us Gen Zers have babies of our own. They don’t have a name yet, but we will probably call them Generation Alpha. They are not the beginning. They are a beginning, just like we were. We are zoomers. We are speeding toward something. The earth spins so fast. Sometimes it goes so fast that I want to get off, but most of the time I am thankful for the speed.
I am a zoomer and we were, after all, built for this. I wonder if we will ever get to where we are going. I wonder how much will change before it’s all over. We are zooming into the future where everything matters, where we matter, where what we do together matters. Being young is so cool. We are crazy and stupid and full of ideas. Everyone who has been young knows this. I’m sure you remember being filled with this brief and powerful and perfect feeling. The feeling that you and your friends and everyone your age are the most important people in the world. I am so spoiled and lucky and safe, and every wish I’ve ever made has come true at least a tiny bit, well maybe not the pony, not world peace, not now that I’ve said them out loud.
We are the future of the planet, held together by the same meme signifiers and memories of school shootings, united by how spongy our brains were when those big things happened. I don’t think the hyperpolarized members of my generation will magically come together and collectively accelerate us into some full automation utopia. I don’t know what we will destroy together, the national parks we will pillage, the deserts we will invade, the animals that will die out under our care, what will happen when those resources run out, whose children we will put in cages.
We are what we have been called and diagnosed with and what we write in our bios. Identity is a Swedish prison, comfortable but still you can’t leave. The floors are made of that IKEA wood; we cannot use a spoon to escape. Feelings are not facts unless we decide that they are. We can escape by creating. Time has never moved faster than it is moving right now. We are not doomed as long as we keep going. We are algorithmically and tenderly filled with life and vaccines and nicotine vapor. We are the products of our time and soon our time will be a product of us. Isn’t that terrible? Isn’t that wonderful? I can imagine a world where the same word means both. We already have our own language.
Seapunk
Coquette
Tomato girl microaesthetic
Quirky reached its peak when I was in seventh grade. Everything I thought was cool could be found at the same store, and if it wasn’t there this week it would be the next. Manufacturing speeds accelerated and matched the growth and emergence of trends. But millennials fought back. Individuality felt like their God-given consolation prize, their post-soccer-game orange slice time, a part of life that could not be erased, but it was. There was New Girl and Moonrise Kingdom and pop-punk. Trends went viral. Nothing belonged to anyone. Individuality was stripped of its rite of passage status. The only forms of revolt were a complete rejection of quirk, normcore—“an anti-aspirational attitude, a capitalization of the possibility of misinterpretation”—or an embrace of trends, signifiers, and clothing that were too controversial or aesthetically unappealing to be mass-produced. Eventually these forms of revolt became quirks themselves and the quirks ended up at Urban Outfitters, near the Ramones T-shirts and the ripped sweaters.
If ugly can become beautiful and the 90s have been cool since the 90s and girls born in the year 2000 dress just like the pop stars who topped the charts on the day they popped out, then nothing will ever be able to go anywhere. If we exist within boundaries, we cannot push them. That is why certain members of Gen Z have embraced them on Musical.ly. They all lip-synch to whatever song is trending and perform identical little rituals and dances to go along, to not be alone. This is why other members spend hours in chat rooms looking for the group that best matches their niche ideology: feminist libertarians, monarchists, queer ecosocialists, young Hegelians, transfascists. As Gen Z comes of age, we find the packs within the packs. An embrace of the pack, a drive to follow and fit in, to let go of our fetishization of quirk is new. We have come so far that the act of fitting in becomes the most rebellious thing one can do. I wonder where the girls with mustache finger tattoos are now.
Rage
Rage seems to be the most important emotion of our times. Everyone is angry. If you’re not angry you’re not paying attention! It doesn’t matter whom you are angry at, you should be angry at someone. Rage is an energy, like wind in a turbine or sun on a panel or water in a wheel. If we can harness it, then maybe we can save ourselves.
Aren’t you angry? we get asked. We left you a dying earth. Shouldn’t you be doing something about it? Shouldn’t you at least be mad? I don’t think that I’ve ever felt rage.
Once, Gideon punched a wall until his knuckles bled. He laughed when I told him he was just angry because he didn’t get what he wanted. He laughed and asked me if there was any other reason to be angry at all. Rage stems from entitlement, and entitlement is not always something to be ashamed of. We are all entitled to safety and justice (whatever that means?) and probably a lot more. When these needs are not met, when they are stolen or withheld, rage seems like a very proper response. Rage seems like a means of survival. Punching a wall seems like a fine enough use of rage. It won’t save you, but it helps. Maybe one day we can get all the angry young men together who feel like something that should be theirs, always was theirs, is being taken from them. We could set them up in a field with a huge wall and they could punch it all day long and we could harvest the strength of their punches and power a town for a night or two. It wouldn’t have to be a small town. I’m sure we would have many wall-punching men driving in from across the state, to be a part of something that mattered, to use their anger for something real. If I could send them all to fight with the enemy for a year I would. I think it would be good for their rage. Their natural and primal male rage, not a symptom of toxic masculinity, just a symptom of being a man with thousands of years of knowledge on how to conquer, protect, kill, define, destroy, avenge, maim, make, smash, fix, pillage, and build buried deep at the back of their skulls. Sometimes I feel a twinge of rage, a surge of denied entitlement when I remember that I do not possess this same ancient knowledge, even though it is something I feel I deserve. The idea that I feel like I deserve something gives me another tiny twinge of what might be the first symptoms of rage.
Safe
A safe place used to be a place where you were not going to get hurt. Now a safe place is a place where you are not going to feel hurt. Feelings became facts at some point between 2016 and now. When boys are gentle I am always surprised. When the members of a space decide to call it safe they should be thanked. Everyone should be kept safe; most of us already are. The people who came before us left a dying planet, but they have decided to provide us with some safe spaces. Thank God. In these spaces I will not feel hurt. When the fires come, I know where I will be, right by the self-care station with the mandalas and the chai.
Tender
To be tender, to be vulnerable, to be understanding, to be good. Jenny Holzer put letters up on a movie marquee: “It is in your self-interest to find a way to be very tender.” Gen Z girls and gays take these words and make them the words underneath their names on Twitter and Instagram. Everyone wants to be tender. Smol beans, soft bois, tender queers, delicate flowers, a/sexual aesthetic, shy, dressed in pastel primary colors, murmuring “henlo nice 2 meet u.” Why? Tender things must be protected. We all are afraid. The world is scary. Health insurance is expiring. Maybe if we are tender, someone will protect us.
Did Jenny Holzer mean that we ourselves should be soft or that we should be gentle with others or that these things go hand in hand and those hands are called tenderness? Those are hands we should all hold. We all deserve safe spaces, places to go and be held and color in mandalas if that helps. We all must create these safe spaces in our own lives for others. We don’t need meditative coloring books. All we need is tenderness. How hard can that be? Probably very soft.
Troll
The first one was a trans internet user of Stewart Brand’s The WELL with the log-in name “Grandma”; all other trolls followed him.
Lives under bridges among the tall green grass, wearing rags, preying on travelers and innocent bearded goats.
Became a verb
In cute times, 4chan trolled a poll to send Pitbull to Alaska; in less cute times, 4chan trolled a poll to send Taylor Swift to a school for the deaf; in strange times, 4chan found Shia LaBeouf’s art project flag from its livestream’s constellations and contrails and replaced it with a Trump hat (or did he pay them off, was it a lie all along?); in scary times, 4chan is constantly filled and refilled with rape threats, ghosts, neighborhood graffiti, dark triad traits and behaviors, anime characters with souls, and twisted extremism.
Troll is one of many magic- or fairy-tale-coded words floating through the internet, along with ghost, avatar, cursed, main character, and frog. Trolls used to live in isolation under bridges, to be avoided by travelers, but now they live in basements and penthouses and suburban duplexes. A mythological troll is ugly and dirty and lives in a dark place, and its magic is dwarfed by that of its digital namesakes. Trolling (the practice, in cute times) takes one back to a childlike sense of wonder.
UwU
This isn’t a word. It’s an emoticon. It’s a feeling. It’s the face you type when “omg” or “awwwww” is not enough to convey how cute, how warm, how soft, how tender, how pure, how wholesome something is. U is an eye. W is a mouth. U is another eye. UwU is you. UwU is a string of letters that means something, the same thing to everyone who has seen it before. Doesn’t that mean it’s a word? How is it pronounced? If it is a word, what language is it in? Is it part of a language in a fetal stage, WuwWuwism? Something being built right before our eyes? Can we add new words to this language? Or is that just dumb as fuck?
It’s a new word, from an unborn language, but it already has a history and a connotation other than its original meaning. It’s unfortunately seen as creepy or cringe. The word men use when trying to appeal to teenage girls. There are entire blogs dedicated to documenting “UwU Culture,” as they call it. Every year since 2015, it has been collectively redefined. Cute. Creepy. Cringe. Cringe (furry). Always in flux, just the way language has always been, but now with hyperlinks.
Virtue
Virtue, the word, has had a rough go of it lately. It sets off sensors in the center of the deepest and oldest parts of the brain. Virtue. We have said it too much, like when we were little and we said “toy boat, toy boat, toy boat, toy boat, toy boat, toy boat, toyboat, toyboat, toyboat, toboayt, tobayat, toabyat.” Virtue is nothing but a tongue twister, a game, a competition. Who has the most? Who can show it off the best? Who is watching my virtue? Whose virtue am I watching?
Virtue signaling, as we know it in our digital and academic Gen Z circles, is the practice of showing you care, but without putting in any other work. I care, and I want you to know that I care, because maybe that will make you care about me. After every school shooting a post, #NEVERAGAIN. All black is worn to award shows. #NEVERAGAIN. Long paragraphs denounce rapists we’ve never met. A callout. Special filters on profile photos, flags of the country attacked. Loud sparkly signs. #NEVERAGAIN. As a whole, us zoomers hold such signaling in disdain, but within each is a kernel of hope. A sincere little piece of hope. A hope that it never happens again, but then of course there is an again and another again and another. A hope that somehow, something you post matters. A hope that someone cares about you. I hope that you matter.
In a few isolated churches across our nation, mostly Pentecostals, Charismatics, and other evangelicals, there still exists a tradition of snake handling. This ritual consists of holding venomous snakes and not being bitten, in order to show the other churchgoers your piety. A gentle snake is a signal of your virtue. Hundreds have died.
I wonder if we’d have as much virtue signaling as we do if posts could bite. Is the reward worth the risk? Are you pure? Do you matter? Is anyone ready to really hold the snake?
Woke
If you took the red pill you have woken up, but that’s a very different type of woke. The red pill is for the right and woke is for the left or maybe it’s the same type of awake, the type of alertness that hurts. Maybe everything has always been the same, just circles and spirals and mirrors. Sometimes being awake is painful and all you want to do is curl up in some safe space with someone’s or no one’s arms around you. When we wake up and see the world differently, start to recognize power structures, see the algorithms set up, realize our own part in it all, how do we know that we are all waking up in the same reality anymore? I live in clown world. I’ve touched both of Morpheus’s hands. I feel safe all the time. Maybe you wake up somewhere else. When I first heard the word woke, I was fifteen and on social justice Twitter. Now I hear antisemitic New World Order conspiracy theorists using it, but it means the same thing.
I shouldn’t try to speak for my generation; this is just a preliminary glossary, some words of interest, some words that have defined us and some words we have defined.
X
Every word here was once written somewhere else for the very first time, cross-bred or loaned or imagined from nothing. Right now I’m probably living before some word you can’t imagine your life without. I’d like to shout out John Milton, the English language’s most prolific neologizer and creator of more than six hundred words (including the hits lovelorn, pandemonium, and irresponsible), and to quickly note the nine most common ways words are created:
Acronym: Laser stands for “Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation,” but on the other hand, taser stands for “Tom A. Swift Electric Rifle” because Tom A. Swift was the protagonist of the inventor’s favorite childhood book series.
Affixation: Adding established prefixes or suffixes to existing words, ex. hyper+reality=hyperreality. Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest known use of the word is from around 1970. Before that I guess reality felt more real and the word was not needed.
Back-formation: Creating a new word by removing an affix from an existing word. For example, edit was created perfectly by removing the -or from editor.
Borrowing: Neologism itself is a loanword from French, borrowed in the late 1700s and never changed again.
Coinage: Inventing completely new words with little to no historical connection to existing words, no process but that of the imagination, just vibes. Coined words are often born with copyrights, but a well-coined word will escape the chains of intellectual property through genericization, the natural open sourcing of language: escalator, kerosene, google, jacuzzi, velcro, rollerblade.
Compounding: When a word combines two complete words. There’s the mundane toothpaste, teaspoon, bathtub. There’s the less obvious but still unsurprising anybody, online, yourself. There’s the sublime metaphorical sweetness of rainbow, wishbone, keepsake, cupcake, butterfly, skyscraper. Imagine being the first person who ever said butterfly or the guy who decided the building would scrape the sky. And then there are some so logical that they are lovely or so lovely that they are logical, the ones compounded in perfect flow. Words we forget could have ever been apart, like: no-thing, no-body; words we forget where to even split in two, no-where/now-where/now-here.
Portmanteau: Brunch, incel, edgelord, spam, goon, chocoholic, smog, himbo, chortle, snark, goldendoodle, and I could go on forever.
Reduplication: This word formation process, referring to semi-repeating a word within itself, feels whimsical, like baby talk. Sometimes it means a word gets repeated to signify its smaller than usual size, chitchat, pitter-patter, splish-splash. In other languages, reduplication changes definitions, but in English, it’s just for fun.
Semantic change: One of our more mystical linguistic creation processes, in which a word is imbued with a new definition but unchanged visually. It remains identical on the page and to the ear yet different in the brain, real-life alchemy. Once the literal becomes figurative, even just once, the whole word can begin to drift away from its meaning and into something new. Unlike the other linguistic neologism creation processes, this can take lifetimes. Yet it seems that sometimes these shifts and drifts from the real to the figurative and then from that figurative into our new real follow some sort of logical magic or magical logic, an imperceptibly constant motion, like the earth spinning around and around or gravity or God. The word silly started off meaning blessed, back in its Old English pre-shift definition. Then the meaning shifted from blessed into innocent through the Middle Ages’ generations of speakers, and then it became what it is. That is, you are blessed to be innocent and then you are naïve because of your innocence and finally your naïveté makes you silly.
Young
There’s a meme that goes, would you rather go crazy or go stupid? I don’t know why it always makes me laugh. Maybe I laugh just because I don’t know why. The mystery of it gets me. Being young is having a million questions while loving a mystery that will never be solved. Being young is feeling like the end is near. We have climate change. They had nuclear war. Everyone had something. For as long as we stretch forward there will always be something. Being young is going crazy and going stupid all at once. Being young is about extremes and Gen Z is so young and so extreme. Desperate times call for desperate measures. All times are desperate. Desperation is part of being human. I’m desperate to define myself and redefine myself because that is what it means to be young. Remembering that you won’t be young forever is hard when you have been young forever.
Zoomer
We are called Generation Z. Z is the last letter of the alphabet, but we will not be the last generation. It feels like that sometimes, but feelings are not always facts and some of us Gen Zers have babies of our own. They don’t have a name yet, but we will probably call them Generation Alpha. They are not the beginning. They are a beginning, just like we were. We are zoomers. We are speeding toward something. The earth spins so fast. Sometimes it goes so fast that I want to get off, but most of the time I am thankful for the speed.
I am a zoomer and we were, after all, built for this. I wonder if we will ever get to where we are going. I wonder how much will change before it’s all over. We are zooming into the future where everything matters, where we matter, where what we do together matters. Being young is so cool. We are crazy and stupid and full of ideas. Everyone who has been young knows this. I’m sure you remember being filled with this brief and powerful and perfect feeling. The feeling that you and your friends and everyone your age are the most important people in the world. I am so spoiled and lucky and safe, and every wish I’ve ever made has come true at least a tiny bit, well maybe not the pony, not world peace, not now that I’ve said them out loud.
We are the future of the planet, held together by the same meme signifiers and memories of school shootings, united by how spongy our brains were when those big things happened. I don’t think the hyperpolarized members of my generation will magically come together and collectively accelerate us into some full automation utopia. I don’t know what we will destroy together, the national parks we will pillage, the deserts we will invade, the animals that will die out under our care, what will happen when those resources run out, whose children we will put in cages.
We are what we have been called and diagnosed with and what we write in our bios. Identity is a Swedish prison, comfortable but still you can’t leave. The floors are made of that IKEA wood; we cannot use a spoon to escape. Feelings are not facts unless we decide that they are. We can escape by creating. Time has never moved faster than it is moving right now. We are not doomed as long as we keep going. We are algorithmically and tenderly filled with life and vaccines and nicotine vapor. We are the products of our time and soon our time will be a product of us. Isn’t that terrible? Isn’t that wonderful? I can imagine a world where the same word means both. We already have our own language.
