Deep Lore / Part 1
Where Slang Comes From
The Two Rivers, the algorithm machine, and the void where meaning goes to die
Every slang term your kid uses was invented by someone, somewhere, in some corner of the internet you've never heard of. It traveled through a very specific pipeline to reach your child's vocabulary, and by the time you hear it, it's almost certainly already dying.
This is the story of that pipeline.
Linguist Adam Aleksic (the Etymology Nerd) has a rule of thumb: roughly 95% of viral slang originates from one of two sources: African American Vernacular English or 4chan. That might sound unlikely, but scroll down and you'll see exactly how it works.
Source: Aleksic, Adam. Interview with Figma Blog, January 2026. Also: Algospeak (Knopf, 2025).
The Two Rivers
Where almost all slang begins
River One: Black Culture & Community
The single biggest source of English slang, not just internet slang but ALL slang, is African American Vernacular English. This has been true for decades. Jazz gave us “cool.” Hip-hop gave us “diss” and “beef.” Ballroom and drag culture gave us “slay,” “serve,” “shade,” “read,” and “the tea.”
In the internet age, the pipeline runs through Black Twitter, hip-hop, and creators who originate phrases that eventually get picked up by the algorithm and spread to everyone else. By the time a white teenager in the suburbs is saying “that's bussin fr fr,” the Black communities who created those phrases have usually moved on.
This matters because it's a pattern of cultural creation, mainstream adoption, and erasure of origin that's been happening for a very long time. The internet just made it faster.
Source: Aleksic, Adam. Algospeak (Knopf, 2025). Green, Lisa J. African American English: A Linguistic Introduction (Cambridge UP, 2002).
River Two: The Fringe Internet
The other major tributary of modern slang flows from the anonymous corners of the internet: 4chan boards, incel forums, gaming communities, and the “manosphere.” These communities developed elaborate in-group vocabularies, often deliberately obscure, designed to separate insiders from outsiders.
Terms like “based,” “pilled,” “sigma,” “mewing,” “mogging,” and “looksmaxxing” all started in these spaces before leaking outward. The path usually goes: anonymous forum → Reddit → gaming/streaming culture → meme accounts → TikTok → mainstream.
An important difference from River One: when AAVE terms go mainstream, they typically lose their cultural context but remain fairly harmless. When 4chan/incel terms go mainstream, they sometimes carry ideological baggage that the new users don't even recognize. A 12-year-old saying “sigma” as a joke doesn't know they're echoing a framework that ranks men by perceived dominance. That's context collapse in action.
Source: Aleksic, Adam. Algospeak (Knopf, 2025). Dazed Digital, “From looksmaxxing to mogging,” February 2025. Merriam-Webster Slang entries for “mog” and “looksmaxxing” (2025).
The Algorithm Machine
Where the rivers meet and everything goes viral
Both rivers flow into the same ocean: algorithmic short-form video. TikTok, YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels. These platforms are where niche slang becomes everyone's slang, and they do it through a very specific mechanism.
A creator uses a term. The algorithm notices engagement. It shows the video to more people. Those people engage. More creators use the term to ride the wave. The algorithm feeds it to even MORE people. Within days, a word that existed in a 500-person forum is being used by millions of people who have no idea where it came from.
Aleksic calls this an “inflection point” in human language. Slang has always spread through culture, but algorithms have compressed the timeline from years to weeks.
The Amplification Loop
Example: “Rizz” went from NYC streaming to Oxford Word of the Year in ~2 years. Pre-algorithm, that would have taken a decade.
Side channel: Algospeak
There's a third, weirder source of new words: the algorithm itself. TikTok's content moderation suppresses certain terms, so creators invented workarounds. “Unalive” instead of kill. “Seggs” instead of sex. “Corn” as code for porn. These aren't organic slang. They're linguistic mutations caused by algorithmic pressure. And they're leaking into real life: kids are now using “unalive” in school essays and casual conversation, completely detached from its TikTok censorship origin.
Source: Aleksic, Adam. NPR interview, July 2025. Aleksic, Adam. Algospeak (Knopf, 2025).
The Void
When nothing means anything, and that's the point
How We Got Here: The Sincerity Ladder
Every generation's humor is a reaction to the previous one's. And if you zoom out far enough, you can see a clear pattern: a ladder where each rung strips away another layer of sincerity.
Told jokes. Setup, punchline.
"Take my wife — please!"
↵ Sincerity was the default
Added irony. The joke was that jokes were kind of dumb.
Letterman, Seinfeld, dry wit
↵ Stripped away earnestness
Meta-ironic. Self-aware about being self-aware.
Advice Animals, deep-fried memes
↵ Stripped away the straight face
Absurdist. Non-sequitur. The absence of a punchline WAS the joke.
Surreal TikToks, low-effort shitposts
↵ Stripped away structure
Post-ironic. The wink is gone. "Skibidi."
6 7. Chicken jockey. Italian brainrot.
↵ Stripped away meaning itself
What Happens After Irony?
Here's the thing about Gen Alpha's humor that baffles everyone over 20: it's not ironic. It's not sincere, either. It's post-ironic: a space where the distinction between “I mean this” and “I'm kidding” has collapsed entirely, and asking “are they serious?” is the wrong question because the answer is genuinely “both and neither.”
When a 12-year-old says “skibidi,” they're not making a reference, deploying irony, or communicating meaning. They're doing something more fundamental: signaling membership in a group through shared recognition of a meaningless sound. The linguist Esteban Touma at Babbel calls it a generational “verbal tic”: the word functions as a social signal, not a unit of meaning.
“6 7.” “Chicken jockey.” “Italian brainrot.” These aren't slang in the traditional sense. They're closer to shibboleths: passwords that prove you're on the inside. The meaning IS that there's no meaning, and if you need it explained, that's the explanation.
Think about that for a second. Previous generations created words that meant something and watched them lose meaning as they spread. Gen Alpha starts with nothing and sometimes builds meaning later through sheer repetition. It's the slang pipeline running in reverse.
Source: Touma, Esteban (Babbel), quoted in Upworthy, September 2025. Neon Music, “6 7 Meme Psychology,” October 2025.
It's Not Stupidity. It's a Defense Mechanism.
Here's where it gets interesting, and where the nihilism actually starts making sense if you think about it from your kid's perspective.
Your child has grown up in a world where:
- →Everything gets commodified. Every authentic thing gets noticed by an algorithm, amplified to millions, picked up by brands, explained by news anchors, and killed within weeks. (This website is, itself, an example of this process. I am aware.)
- →Everything is tracked. They've been algorithmically profiled since before they could read. Their attention is a product being sold. They know this.
- →Sincerity is a liability. In an environment where everything you post is permanent, searchable, and screenshottable, being earnest is risky. Being incomprehensible is safer.
Internet culture journalist Ryan Broderick (Garbage Day) argues that when all cultural activity collapses into a single imperative (getting attention) and attention is completely commodified by algorithmic platforms, the only way to create something the system can't co-opt is to create something it can't understand. Meaninglessness becomes a form of rebellion. You can't strip-mine a word for marketing value if the word doesn't mean anything. You can't have a CNN anchor explain “6 7” because there's nothing to explain.
The Co-Option Clock
At this speed, the only terms that survive are the ones the machine can't process. Nonsense is the ultimate DRM.
Full disclosure: this entire website is, in some sense, an act of meaning-extraction. I'm taking your kid's vocabulary and turning it into something comprehensible for parents, which is exactly the kind of thing that kills slang. I know. I contain multitudes. I also contain a dictionary.
Source: Broderick, Ryan. Referenced in Cory Doctorow's Pluralistic, February 2025. Neon Music, “6 7 Meme Psychology,” October 2025.
Sources
- Aleksic, Adam. Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language. Knopf, 2025.
- Aleksic, Adam. Interview with Figma Blog, January 2026.
- Aleksic, Adam. Interview with NPR Weekend Edition, July 2025.
- Broderick, Ryan. Garbage Day newsletter. Referenced via Doctorow, Cory. Pluralistic, February 2025.
- Green, Lisa J. African American English: A Linguistic Introduction. Cambridge UP, 2002.
- Dazed Digital. “From looksmaxxing to mogging: How incel language went mainstream.” February 2025.
- Merriam-Webster Slang Section. Various entries, 2024-2025.
- Neon Music. “6 7 Meme Psychology: Gen Alpha's Meaningless Slang Is Genius.” October 2025.
- Touma, Esteban (Babbel). Quoted in Upworthy, September 2025.