Chewed up and spat out: The tainted afterlife of a buzzword

How words go from obscurity to vitality to the linguistic dustbin of the past.

Recently, I wanted to describe something as “unprecedented”, but couldn’t bring myself to. Even typing the word now, I can almost smell the hand sanitiser, feel the phantom tickle of a face mask, and see nightmarish flashbacks of another 1pm press conference. It was, after all, one of the buzzwords of the Covid era.

That word – “era” – is now ruined for me, too. Taylor Swift’s Era’s Tour colonised it to the point that I can no longer enter a new phase of life without feeling like I should be shimmying in a sequinned bodysuit and knee high boots. 

So, what happens to these now-tainted buzz words? And why do we become so allergic to them?

Plucked from relative obscurity, repeated millions of times, meme-ified and stretched beyond their original meaning, they leave behind a sort of linguistic hangover. Popularised words tend to run their course and are then immortalised, forever tied to a particular time. Describe something as “nifty”, “groovy” or “swell”, and people might wonder if you’re a historic imposter à la The Brady Bunch Movie. Refer to someone as your “bae” or “boo” and you’ll appear to have been cryogenically frozen since 2013. But is the internet the reason we cycle through buzz words at such alarming speed?

“Online, the capital is attention,” explains Dr Andreea Calude, an associate professor in linguistics at the University of Waikato. “Attention is the thing that drives online engagement… that really motivates innovation.” She points to the chronically online world putting pressure on people to produce new buzzwords “that attracts attention – the novelty.”

Sometimes the buzz words are genuine neologisms – think “looksmaxxing” (a compound of two words) or “delulu”, (a shortened and jazzed up version of delusional) – but often, they’re merely a plain old word, suddenly thrust into the spotlight.

In August 2024, content creator Jools LeBron sent “demure” on a stratospheric rise to briefly dominate popular culture. Her viral “very demure, very mindful” videos were viewed tens of millions of times.

Brands, eager to show they had their finger on the pulsing heart of the zeitgeist, jumped on the trend. Zillow appointed LeBron its “Chief Demure Officer”, while everyone from Southwest Airlines to Netflix found a way to work the viral phrase into their marketing.

A decade earlier, teenager Kayla Newman described her perfectly groomed eyebrows as being “on fleek”. The missive became the phrase du jour, quickly expanding to mean “anything excellent”, eventually arriving at the surest sign of slang ubiquity: corporate marketing. Global pancake empire IHOP started tweeting that its “pancakes were on fleek”. Taco Bell soon followed suit, declaring its “Taco’s on fleek”. 

But like Icarus flying too close to the sun, brands tend to discover that by the time they get their hands on a buzz word, it may not remain cool much longer. Taco Bell’s coup de grace came when its then-CEO Brian Niccol butchered the phrase as “on cleek” during an investor presentation. Determined to recover from the gaffe, Taco Bell introduced “Millennial Word of the Week”, in which employees in their 20s explained trending slang to management via a companywide email. Words including “lit” were even displayed on screens throughout its corporate offices.

Dr Calude explains the whole point in having your own language is a “membership affiliation” to signal “you’re one of us. Slang is just another in-group way for a generation of a certain age to recognise people of their own kind.” She says. So of course, when a middle-aged pancake exec starts calling things “demure” it’s bound to be less appealing, and demure is swiftly demurred by the cool kids.

My aversion to “unprecedented” certainly hasn’t hurt the word’s prospects. Professor Kate Burridge, a linguist at Monash University, says the word has taken off since Covid, although perhaps with a weakened meaning. Once meaning something never seen or done before, it is now used less literally, simply to mean exceptionally large.

Burridge explains that while words can die out from neglect, “overuse can also kill them.” Some fallen buzz words aren’t extinct, but remain dormant. Burridge points to what linguist Dylan Hughes calls the “funny cycle”, a word or phrase becomes funny, then unfunny, then is used ironically – until a later generation, who are no longer in on the joke, start to use it sincerely again.

Sometimes a new word was there all along, and we just didn’t realise. Take “unfriend”. I’d assumed this to be a modern word, meaning: to remove someone as a friend on a social media platform. But Dr Calude tells me the word long predates Facebook, tracing back centuries where it was used as a noun, meaning the opposite of friend, an enemy, an unfriend. 

It seems every generation harbours fears that the generation below it is bastardising the language. In the early 2000s, there was much pearl clutching over the filler “like” being far too liberally peppered through speech, seeming to appear at ever-shorter intervals the younger the speaker.

It’s easy to see how dilution through overuse – or, what linguists call “linguistic bleaching” – can burn through words. The word “awesome” literally once meant to inspire awe, now it can be used to describe an above-average burger. A few years ago, I heard a radio ad in which an enthusiastic narrator proclaimed that Christmas was “literally around the corner”, something that is literally impossible.

Dr Calude has reassurance. “It’s OK that language changes. It’s OK that there’s semantic bleaching. Don’t worry, the whole language isn’t going to lose all its expressive power and creativity. Where there’s bleaching in one corner, there’s new innovation in another corner, and new forms sprouting up.”

So most buzz words end up hung out to dry but there are some outliers – words that appear to have beaten the odds, enduring decades of liberal use without showing signs of slipping out of fashion. Perhaps the greatest survivor of all is the word “cool”.

“Cool” has been in frequent use for around 90 years and, to this day, sounds just as appropriate uttered by a war veteran as it does on the lips of a gum chewing teen. No longer simply meaning fashionable or culturally “in” it can describe an item, person, feeling, place or song. Unlike so many of its fallen linguistic peers, “cool” prevails. But why? 

“Some words become entrenched, and they kind of just stay, because they’re just so frequent…but the trade-off.. is that they do become semantically bleached, so their semantic force is decreased.” Explains Dr Calude. “Cool is a little bit … bleached of meaning. It’s a bit plain and not very exciting.” It seems the success of “cool” was due to it not trying to hard – essentially “cool” was able to stay cool by being … cool. 

When “cool: became popular all those years ago, no one could have guessed at its lingering success. How could they have? That type of staying power is so rare, it’s practically unprecedented.