This is How to Be a Better Human.

I am your host, Chris Duffy, and today on the show, we are talking about how the internet and more specifically social media has changed the way that we think, speak, and relate to one another.

But we are specifically going to be looking at this through the lens of language.

Our guest, Adam Alexic, is the author of AlgoSpeak, how social media is transforming the future of language.

You may know Adam as etymology nerd online, and Adam spends a lot of time thinking about how words

shift and evolve. To me, this is very much not just an intellectual exercise. It's interesting

intellectually, but it's so much more than that. This is about how we communicate with each other.

How do we tell other people what we're thinking and feeling and experiencing?

At its heart, this is about how language shapes our reality.

Here's an example that Adam gives in his 2024 talk at TEDx Penn.

It's about why several years ago conversations about topics like death, mortality,

and suicide with young people seem to all suddenly involve a strange new word, unalive.

Adam surveyed over a thousand middle school teachers, and he heard that they were hearing

the word unalive in their lunchrooms, but it was also popping up in places like essays on Hamlet or classroom discussions of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

So where did Unalive come from? Here's Adam.

For such a recent word, Unalive shows up in an impressive range of scenarios.

But the main function appears to be euphemistic.

Many kids use the word when they're uncomfortable talking about topics like death, since

unalive sounds like a less scary word.

And in many ways, this is nothing new.

We've been euphemizing death as long as we've had language.

The word decease, for example, comes from Latin de Kesus, which was a euphemism for the previous Latin word for death,

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