Six-hundred attendees packed into Sweeney Auditorium in Sage Hall on Oct. 26 for a talk by Adam Aleksic, better known online as The Etymology Nerd. Aleksic, who has amassed over three million followers across TikTok, Instagram and YouTube, discussed how social media algorithms are shaping the way people use language.
Aleksic has gone viral for his videos on linguistics, ranging from explaining the etymology of brainrot terms like “skibidi” and “rizz,” to creating entire animal languages, like one where each bird whistle represents a letter.
A 2023 Harvard University graduate with a B.A. in Government and Linguistics, Aleksic first became interested in etymology at a young age. “I was in ninth grade, and I read this book called The Etymologicon by Mark Forsyth,” he said. “I started this little blog for myself in tenth grade called etymologynerd.com… and then I started linguistics in college.”
While at Harvard, he began posting videos talking about fun etymological facts. In June of this year, Aleksic published his first book titled “Algospeak,” which discusses the phenomenon of self-censorship many online creators use to avoid saying words that could get their videos removed from various platforms due to content moderation violations.
Common examples of “algospeak” included replacing sensitive words, such as using “unalive,” to refer to death or “self-unaliving” for suicide, in an attempt to evade automatic content removal. This can also occur with emojis, with a well-known example being the watermelon-slice emoji being used to represent the Palestinian flag due to their similar color schemes.
During his talk at Smith, Aleksic focused both on “algospeak” and on recommendation algorithms as a whole, including how the algorithm works in a circular nature. He used the examples of matcha, Labubu dolls and Dubai chocolate, all of which have been trends in recent months. He explained how the algorithm promotes content containing trending topics like matcha is marketable. Viewers then continue to talk about matcha online, purchase matcha drinks in the real world and make more videos about their own matcha-making process. This reinforces the algorithm, causing it to continue recommending matcha-related videos to more people, and the cycle continues.
“It’s really worth thinking about whether we’re seeing more of these things because they’re algorithmically fit to go viral,” Aleksic said. “The algorithm is just incentivized to show you commodifiable products.”
Aleksic also discussed how these circular algorithms are influencing our language, particularly around the word “delve” and its usage by ChatGPT.
“There’s a natural vibe we have with the word ‘delve’, and then somewhere along the line, ChatGPT misrepresented that vibe,” he said. “Over time, that… reinforces the algorithm way more than any actually spoken dialect, and it’s literally starting to bleed over into our actual culture.”
Aleksic further discussed how ChatGPT warps our collective sense of reality.
“There’s… reality, and then there’s a chatbot’s understanding of what reality is. That affects our actual reality.” he said. “Now we’re, ironically, circularly getting closer to the AI in our human-to-human interactions.”
Throughout the talk, Aleksic encouraged people to think critically about how algorithms are changing the real world, linguistically or otherwise.
“You’ll find that some forms of media have more questionable portrayals of reality than other forms of media,” he said. “Media literacy means not just knowing how our world works, but it’s understanding where your media is coming from and how media is shown to you. We should really be thinking about these things deliberately.”
This was a very interesting article! 🙂