Adam Alexic, welcome back to the show. Thank you. So excited to be back. Yeah, the etymology nerd,

again, for those who aren't aware, since we last spoke, you published a book, AlgoSpeak,

and we were just talking about how I sort of managed to interview you just before you kind of

were doing the press for that, and now again, just after you're doing the press for that,

but it's still available. So, you know,

check it out in the description. AlgoSpeak is kind of about the way that social media is influencing our language. People talk a lot about how like, you know, the dialect of the kids is

going down the pan because of the way that the internet is changing how we speak.

To what extent do you think social media is just a continuation of the way that young people

are always adapting language versus it being actually a distinctive, like linguistic moment?

Yeah, well, I mean, 100% it is both at the same time. There will always be a need among children to

differentiate themselves from adults to build a shared identity for themselves. So that's not new.

Kids have always been coming up with new slang. But I am a strong believer that the medium is the

message and that the way that the medium is organized will affect the way we communicate.

So when we had more oral tradition,

we would tell our stories differently. We would use rhyme and meter. When we had paper, we would

segment our stories into chapters. And once we moved to the internet, we finally had this opportunity

for the written replication of informal speech. And algorithms, I think, are similarly an inflection point kind of comparable to the printing press or to the advent of paper.

It is a new medium that uniquely compresses things.

And it might be the first time that language is, well, I guess we've had this with print, that it is, there is a industry which controls how we can communicate.

But it's more salient than ever.

We have these big tech companies with control and these metrics optimizing for attention.

And our language is evolving through their kind of constraints, their guidances, their things that they're optimizing for

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