“Do you have a high visual weight or a low visual weight?”, “Are you deer pretty, cat pretty, or fox pretty?”, “This is my girl dinner”, “Have you ever heard of the lip theory?”, “You need to use the sandwich outfit theory!”, “Do you have a coastal grandma, fair grunge, or losercore aesthetic?” If any of these aforementioned phrases were to even gently graze the ears of the world’s early-settlers, the sheer amount of energy needed to scale this generation-based language barrier would be so great that every brain across the globe would overheat from the rapid surge of electrical activity used to process the meaning of these words. However, to a majority of Gen Z TIkTok users, such phrases are almost a second language that moth-minded “influencers” of the platform are obnoxiously teaching us to be bilingual in, each time we scroll down through the rabbit hole of the app. Yet, this newly founded chronically-online terminology is actually quite unique in the sense that it is the only language that will wither away your brain cells over time if you try to comprehend it.
While the length of this social-media-dictionary is painfully vast, the foundation of this way-of-talk is quite thin, with each new phrase being coined on the Tik Tok platform simply being a pre-established notion playing dress up in tiaras and crowns to carry a greater purpose. For instance, the act of eating an assortment of snacky-foods for a late night meal has been coronated with the greater, corporate-feminist-friendly title of “Girl Dinner.” Similarly, the mentality of justifying spending behaviors has been another recent acquisition into this brand of shallow linguistics, under the name of “Girl Math.” But, as this Tik Tok dictionary continues to be infinitiley written, these desperate attempts to create trendy, buzz-words have spread into the fashion and beauty scene as well, with phrases like “lip theory”, which literally just describes wearing red lipstick with lip liner, and “High visual weight/low visual weight” to refer to whether heavy-weight makeup or light-weight makeup suits you better, frequently circumventing the app.
Additionally, the TikTok population has even created various taxons of beauty itself through this frankenstein surgery of words, with the introduction of descriptions such as “deer pretty”, “natural pretty”, “forrest pretty”, and “rare pretty.” At this rate, we may as well trade in our dictionaries for MadLibs, as all you have to do is change the noun before “pretty” and you’d most likely still find an entire hashtag dedicated to that niche branch of beauty. To me, it seems as though words have become their own sort of product, as if they are being mass-produced in a factory and commercialized like a piece of fast-fashion. Of course, in this internet driven era, hopping on the bandwagon of popular phrases is a vital component to riding with the algorithm and achieving viral success. However, the fault is not necessarily found in the wide-srpead use of these words, but rather the alarming speed in which these new terms are continuously being generated.
This recent obsession of sculpting new buzz-words has almost transformed into a competition to see who can create the most “profound” piece of terminology possible, except the nerve fibers of the competitors have become so frayed that they are completely incapable of seeing the inane gibberish they’re outputting into society. The idea of matching the color of your shoes to your shirt in an outfit does not need to be draped and dolled-up in this gown of “The Outfit Sandwich Theory”, as if it’s some principle on the same planes of Schrodinger’s Cat or Newton’s Law of Motion; it doesn’t need this hand-crafted name to exist. In fact, this lobotomizing of the English language only deludes people into feeling as though they’ve discovered some groundbreaking phenomenon, when they are just in fact shedding light on a translucent observation. The whole situation is akin to a student who looks up synonyms for every single word in their essay to boost its level of sophistication, writing their own philosophical scripture that’s gradually being written in a Wikipedia-like fashion, in which any fellow believer can add their own equally superfluous contribution of nonsensical words. These pseudo-insightful phrases are already plaguing the general public, with “Girl Dinner”, “Girl Math”, and “Costal Grandma Aesthetic” bleeding into everyday conversations.
As this occurs though, it only encourages a reductive societal culture that believes they are spicing their personality with a hint of artificial-Gen Z quirky flair, when in reality they are just inducing the brain rot of human logic. So many of these fame-starved TikTok influencers want to come across as knowledgeable, cultured intellectuals who are able to engineer these fashionable and marketable labels for one-inch deep observations. Yet, these people don’t realize that giving these basic observations their own ridiculously specialized name that consists of no more than two to three words inherently waters down the profundity, if any, of the observation in the first place.
As with any species over time, evolutions are bound to occur. Thus, this change in language and the way we speak should simply be expected. Though, when it reaches the point where preteens are posting a video of themselves asking viewers to tell them whether they fall into the “fairy pretty” or “mermaid pretty” category, that’s a clear sign that we are only evolving off the grounds of reality. We need to stop ornamenting and trendifying the ordinary aspects of life and just arrive at the conclusion that we can’t treat every little event as something with great significance that’s deserving of its own dignified title, or else we open the breeding grounds to an infantilized mentality. At the end of the day, some things are meant to be insignificant.