For Scientific American Science Quickly, I'm Kendra Pior Lewis, in for Rachel Feltman. Drumroll, please.

2026 is here. Happy New Year to our listeners from the entire Science Quickly team.

All this week, we've been doing something a little different. We've been bringing back some of our favorite episodes of 2025.

Today we revisit the often seemingly meaningless viral slang that social media has unleashed upon humanity.

I can name at least six, seven examples off the top of my head. Our guest in this episode was

Adam Alexic, a linguist and content creator known online as the etymology nerd.

He's also the author of AlgoSpeak, how social media is transforming the future of language.

It might feel like the rise of quote-unquote brain rot is literally rotting brains.

But Adam argues that supposed internet gibberish actually follows the same patterns humans

have used to create language for thousands

of years. The difference is just a speed and scale. Scientific American Associate Editor and

sometimes Substitute Science quickly host, Alison Partial sat down with Adam earlier this year

to chat about this brave new linguistic world. Here's our conversation.

How would you describe your linguistic upbringing in the internet?

What was your formative experiences there?

My first experience with the internet was really Reddit.

I was very bookish and didn't interact with the internet much until

sophomore year of high school where I started this etymology blog,

which back then was called

etymology nerd.com, and I would post a word origin a day, and I would start, like, looking

around on the internet for other, like, resources for etymology, and I stumbled on the subreddit

R-slash etymology, and that was actually one of the best ones out there. So that was kind of

...