Inside The Viral Words That Make You Click - Etymology Nerd - #1086

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
6-7 was voted Word of the Year in 2025 from dictionary.com. Is that cheating? Not even a word. Doesn't mean anything.

**Adam Aleksic** (0:08)
Well, you have to understand that whenever a dictionary chooses their Word of the Year, that's a marketing ploy by big dictionary to sell more dictionaries.

**Chris Williamson** (0:20)
Yes.

**Adam Aleksic** (0:22)
6-7, of course, is this reference where if you say it, you can go viral. That's the idea behind 6-7. That's the whole joke that this is a possibility of getting clipped, that you can cash in on the virality of it for your own game. dictionary.com played that game, but every single person who did it also cash in on that. There was a Connecticut House Representative, Bill Buckby, who said 6-7 on the Connecticut state floor.
All these people are doing the exact same thing as Talen Kinney, who is the basketball player who started the trend, and all the Gen Alpha kids who are cashing in on it, like the 6-7 kid. All of it was a ploy for virality, and it is a realization that clip farming is the future of distribution online.

**Chris Williamson** (1:01)
Wow. But it's a word that doesn't mean anything, and is specifically designed to be vacuous and to incite the question, what does that mean?
Is that unique?

**Adam Aleksic** (1:13)
I don't believe that it doesn't mean anything. I believe even when something is absurd, absurdity is a meaning, and it's absurd for a reason. It's absurd because it's sort of critiquing the general information ecosystem. It's absurd that this would emerge as a word, but that is the meaning. The absurdity of the word is its own definition.

**Chris Williamson** (1:29)
Okay, so it's a story about it. It's a meta word.

**Adam Aleksic** (1:31)
Yeah, exactly.
It's a knowing wink. By uttering 6-7, you're playing into the Panopticon.

**Chris Williamson** (1:37)
Rage bait was Oxford's 2025 word of the year. Right.

**Adam Aleksic** (1:41)
They're also, they were rage baiting with that. They're hoping that it sparks controversy. Now when people are commenting about the word rage bait being chosen as the word of the year, that drives the word further on Twitter or whatever.
X, excuse me, and as a result, more people know about Oxford Dictionaries. You got to remember, this is big dictionary at work.

**Chris Williamson** (1:58)
Slop was another one as well. So a word describing, a word that is sloppy, describing something that is sloppy being used for people to complain about the fact that, look at the state of language today. It's all, well, it's slop actually.

**Adam Aleksic** (2:13)
Yeah, I like to combat that idea that language is slop or brain rot. There's nothing inherently in a word that's good or bad. It's a tool that you can use. But I think we cast our negative associations of social media onto the language. And yeah, of course, a lot of the videos we see are slop. But that doesn't mean the words themselves are bad for your brain.

**Chris Williamson** (2:31)
Do you think is TikTok becoming the most powerful linguistic engine on earth at the moment? Is that what's shaping language more than anything else?

**Adam Aleksic** (2:39)
Absolutely. There was a study by Know Your Meme in 2022 that found where words come from over time by percentage of platforms. It started out mostly on 4chan and Reddit and Twitter, and now it's mostly TikTok and Twitter. Again, sorry, X.

**Chris Williamson** (2:57)
It's still Twitter.

**Adam Aleksic** (2:59)
I know.

**Chris Williamson** (2:59)
It's still Twitter.

**Adam Aleksic** (3:01)
I'm holding on to it.

**Chris Williamson** (3:02)
Yeah.

**Adam Aleksic** (3:03)
Yeah, no, but a lot of stuff is happening in TikTok. There's linguistic innovation.
Everything comes from the user interface. There's a feeling of a conversation happening there. Users come there for the conversation to chip in, to be part of this effervescent thing that's going on, and in that, language is created. Along with this, we have all these echo chambers and algorithmic trends being perpetuated that push modern slang cycles faster than ever before.

**Chris Williamson** (3:27)
Is there such a thing as a Twitter dialect versus a LinkedIn dialect versus a Reddit or a live stream dialect? Are these almost individual variants on language in each of these different cohorts?

**Adam Aleksic** (3:43)
Absolutely. It's the same way when you're in your grandmother's house versus when you're in a frat house, you have a different expectation of how to speak. You're not going to speak to your grandmother the way you would to a frat brother. There's a normal way of communicating. So a platform functions kind of like a house. It is a place where you go to use a certain type of language. So on LinkedIn, you're going to use this more professional language. On Twitter, you're going to engage in more linguistic play where you have all these words like jester gooning or whatever emerge.