NPR.

One of the beautiful and sometimes baffling things about the English language is that it's always changing.

Like, take the word Riz, which means something like charisma, or the word

skibbity, which kind of means anything or nothing, depending on how you use it. A few years ago,

words like these were little known or didn't even exist, but today they're understood and used by

millions of people. Now, don't worry if you don't

count yourselves among them, because according to our guest today, the English language is

changing at a faster pace than ever before, thanks to social media and algorithms.

This is the indicator from Planet Money. I'm Adrian Ma. Today in the show, a conversation with linguist Adam Alexic. He's author of a recently published book called AlgoSpeak, How Social Media is Transforming the Future of Language. This was actually a book I picked for an episode we recently did on Econ Beach Reeds. And after the break, we'll talk with Adam about how the business priorities of social media companies increasingly shaped the way we speak, both online and offline.

If you are a nerd for words, you might have come across Adam Alexic's videos on social media.

Fun fact, everybody has a completely unique emoji style, kind of like an emoji fingerprint,

which also means that no two people will use emojis the exact same way.

Using the handle etymology nerd, Adam posts videos on TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram,

and spends a lot of time breaking down how the internet is changing the way we communicate.

In the same way, everybody builds up their own inside jokes.

Now, in case you're wondering, you have not accidentally hit double speed on your podcast player.

This is how Adam talks in his videos because he says it keeps viewers engaged. And when I called up

Adam recently, Adrian, hello, testing, I started off asking him why he thinks algorithms are shaping the English language like never before.

So you say there are these inflection points in history that have had a huge effect on the way people communicate.

There's the invention of writing and the printing press and the internet.

Now you say we're living through another inflection point shaped by algorithms. Can you

give us your argument in a nutshell? Every time there's a new medium, we're going to have a new

...