Hey, just a quick heads up that we talk about a euphemism for suicide at the beginning of this episode.

Grammar Girl here. I'm Injohn Fogarty, and this is our Thursday interview show. Adam Alexic is a linguist and content creator best known for posting videos as etymology nerd to an audience of nearly

three million. He's the former president of the Harvard undergraduate linguistic society.

He's written for The Washington Post and is a frequent contributor to NPR. And today,

we're going to talk about his new book, AlgoSpeak, which is about how social media is changing our

language. Adam, welcome to the how social media is changing our language.

Adam, welcome to the Grammar Girl podcast.

Thank you. I'm super excited to be here.

Super excited to have you.

So let's start with the basics.

I mean, what is Algo speak?

Yeah.

Well, traditionally the term has referred to words used to evade algorithmic censorship.

The classic example is the word on alive.

So we have actual kids in middle school now saying the word on alive because you can't say

kill on TikTok and other social media platforms. So people find creative ways to circumvent these

guidelines. Yeah, there's a lot of examples like that. There's creative re-spellings people do.

You'll see like comic book style asterisks and at signs and dollar signs, but you'll see words like

segs instead of sex. You'll see words like emojis like the eggplant emoji. These are all

evasive ways to talk on the internet. And it's the idea here is that algorithms are shaping how we

speak. Therefore, Algos speak. My book kind of starts there, but then it dives further because I think algorithms are now shaping every aspect of how we communicate and relate to each other online. Right. I mean, it reminds me, you know, kind of of old school leit speak, you know, where you'd substitute letters for, or numbers for letters and things like that. So it sort of has an in-group

aspect to it as well, doesn't it? Absolutely. So for Algospeak, the in-group is people on social

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