I'm a young Fogarty, your friendly guide to the English language.

We talk about writing, history, rules, and cool stuff.

Today I'm going to talk about the word doom scrolling and in honor of Bill and Ted we're

going to talk about each other versus one another.

I confess that I am a doom scroller, a big, big doom scroller.

Now if you aren't sure what that means, the definition uploaded to Urban Dictionary in

March 2020 by a user who goes by Penelope Penguin is pretty much perfect.

Penelope wrote, it's when you keep scrolling through all your social media feeds, looking

for the most recent upsetting news about the latest catastrophe.

The amount of time spent doing this is directly proportional to how much worse you're

going to feel after you're done.

For example, dude, stop doom scrolling, it's only going to make you feel worse.

I can't.

The dopamine loop is too strong.

It's also been called doom surfing, but doom scrolling has completely went out as the

word people use to describe or bemoan at the behavior.

You can see on Google Trends that both words emerged around the same time in late March,

but in late May, doom scrolling is a search term took off, and doom surfing just continued

to sputter along at a really low level.

People were using the word doom scrolling before March.

Merriam Webster traces it back to at least 2018, but that first definition on Urban Dictionary

was written about two weeks after the NBA shut down, and Tom Hanks announced he had

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