Adam Alexic, welcome to the show.

Hi Alex, I'm super excited to be here.

The etymology nerd, perhaps the world's first, maybe only linguistics, social media influencer.

What's going on with that? Why are people interested in linguistics so much?

I think they're interested in linguistics for the same reason I'm not interested in linguistics.

It, like, speaks to something broader about society, right?

It's not just words. It's never just been words.

Like, you can't talk about anything, obviously, without using words.

So it doesn't matter whether you're a mathematician or a biologist or a philosopher,

you're using words to express your reality.

And that means linguistics reaches into each one of those kind of spheres.

And kind of what I like doing about my videos is that I've been able to use linguistics

as a lens to go deeper into all kinds of things to explore, like our sociological

background to explore different academic fields. And I think people see that there's something

inherent in our language that speaks to the human existence. Yeah, I mean, your videos are all,

I think, if not then definitely primarily YouTube shorts and reels. And they make infographics as

well, but it's the kind of stuff that is

trivia a lot of the time. It's like an interesting fact about this word or this turn of phrase or something. So it's actually quite difficult to know exactly how to

dive into a long form interview about etymology. But the good news is that there is a book on the way that you've just announced, which

has a sort of more general theme, which is specifically about the way that social media is affecting our language, and that social media is the is the frontier of linguistic development.

So perhaps in getting into this, you can give us a brief overview of the thesis that you're talking about.

Yeah. I mean, I think we're now in an era where all language change is happening on social media. You can't get around it.

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