I think you're spot on; slang like "bruh," "sus," and "rizz" is mostly symptom, not cause. It's downstream of a deeper atrophy in attention and inner verbal life. Those intonational nuances you mentioned are interesting: they're compensatory signals when vocabulary shrinks. Adaptive, but still a downgrade from precise words.
The attention economy is the real gut-punch. Those "X min read" labels exist to reassure scroll-addled brains that an article won't demand too much. We've optimized for throughput over depth, and the internal monologue is paying the price. Teaching kids who can't focus for thirty seconds is exhausting, because language is the operating system for thought. No complex sentences in working memory means no complex thoughts. Orwell understood this.
You're right about publishing too. Writing used to impose a tax on sloppiness. Now the barrier to entry is near zero. The old healthy hierarchy; refined literature above sloppy everyday speech, has flattened. We've traded cathedrals for an endless bazaar of hot takes.
That said, I'm not purely declinist. Language has always had low, playful registers (Shakespeare used plenty of street slang). The internet has even created some brilliant compressions. The real danger is when the high registers stop being cultivated, when elite writing starts sounding like group chats.
The fix isn't scolding kids about "bruh." It's protecting space for deep reading, long-form thought, and modeling denser language ourselves. We still have the full toolkit. We're just incentivized not to use it.
Curious: do any of your students notice the shallowness, or is it invisible to them, like water is to a fish?
The smarter students definitely notice because, when I get a chance to speak to them 1-on-1, their language is articulate and their insights and questions can be pretty impressive. One kid even used to apologize to me after class for essentially being sucked into mindless tangents that the other students would go on.
Which brings up an interesting point: this kind of low-effort cultural machinery often can't be fought against because it pulls in the brightest of us against our better judgment. I'm sure I'm guilty of this too. It's far easier and a better social strategy to lower our standards to the least common denominator. That good old race to the bottom...
Thanks for that article! It was really informative! It's so funny that being a Gen-Z, I am not actually conversant with some of the slangs you mentioned haha! I am very grateful that I had a formal upbringing in English. Plus, as a writer, it's obviously more fitting that I speak and write as an educated person.
But I agree 100%. The language these days is quite disgraceful. And frankly, the way we talk (sluggishly and without thought) has become the way we live our lives :_(
"So much of our cultural machinery rewards a thinner and thinner form of consciousness"
I think this is the correct assessment. In my view, modern "cringe" slang is just one of the many symptoms of this great thinning, not so much a cause. Some of the nuances in intonation you mentioned which are used to convey different sentiments are actually pretty fascinating to me.
Social media in general, but even Substack for all its merits, encourages rapid turnover rates of consumption and distribution, which doesn't enable us to slow down and ruminate. It bothers me every time I see the "X min read" labels attached to articles on this platform, and it bothers me even more that I respond to them and defer reading 15+ minute articles until later (=never). The internal monologue is being replaced by incessant consumption, so it's no wonder people are losing the tools to express themselves. I wouldn't so much mind the kids I teach calling each other "bruh" in class if their attention spans could at least last more than thirty seconds at a time.
The demise of traditional forms of publishing (also brought about by the social media revolution) has a part to play too in the perceived decline of language. Average people always spoke in ways that were sloppy and unpublishable, while literature gave language the opportunity to reach its most sublime heights. But the modern style of writing, both in formally published works and in exchanges between persons, involves transcribing the way we speak on paper. When writing itself is so uninspired, our speech will never rise to meet it.
I think you're spot on; slang like "bruh," "sus," and "rizz" is mostly symptom, not cause. It's downstream of a deeper atrophy in attention and inner verbal life. Those intonational nuances you mentioned are interesting: they're compensatory signals when vocabulary shrinks. Adaptive, but still a downgrade from precise words.
The attention economy is the real gut-punch. Those "X min read" labels exist to reassure scroll-addled brains that an article won't demand too much. We've optimized for throughput over depth, and the internal monologue is paying the price. Teaching kids who can't focus for thirty seconds is exhausting, because language is the operating system for thought. No complex sentences in working memory means no complex thoughts. Orwell understood this.
You're right about publishing too. Writing used to impose a tax on sloppiness. Now the barrier to entry is near zero. The old healthy hierarchy; refined literature above sloppy everyday speech, has flattened. We've traded cathedrals for an endless bazaar of hot takes.
That said, I'm not purely declinist. Language has always had low, playful registers (Shakespeare used plenty of street slang). The internet has even created some brilliant compressions. The real danger is when the high registers stop being cultivated, when elite writing starts sounding like group chats.
The fix isn't scolding kids about "bruh." It's protecting space for deep reading, long-form thought, and modeling denser language ourselves. We still have the full toolkit. We're just incentivized not to use it.
Curious: do any of your students notice the shallowness, or is it invisible to them, like water is to a fish?
The smarter students definitely notice because, when I get a chance to speak to them 1-on-1, their language is articulate and their insights and questions can be pretty impressive. One kid even used to apologize to me after class for essentially being sucked into mindless tangents that the other students would go on.
Which brings up an interesting point: this kind of low-effort cultural machinery often can't be fought against because it pulls in the brightest of us against our better judgment. I'm sure I'm guilty of this too. It's far easier and a better social strategy to lower our standards to the least common denominator. That good old race to the bottom...
Thanks for that article! It was really informative! It's so funny that being a Gen-Z, I am not actually conversant with some of the slangs you mentioned haha! I am very grateful that I had a formal upbringing in English. Plus, as a writer, it's obviously more fitting that I speak and write as an educated person.
But I agree 100%. The language these days is quite disgraceful. And frankly, the way we talk (sluggishly and without thought) has become the way we live our lives :_(
"So much of our cultural machinery rewards a thinner and thinner form of consciousness"
I think this is the correct assessment. In my view, modern "cringe" slang is just one of the many symptoms of this great thinning, not so much a cause. Some of the nuances in intonation you mentioned which are used to convey different sentiments are actually pretty fascinating to me.
Social media in general, but even Substack for all its merits, encourages rapid turnover rates of consumption and distribution, which doesn't enable us to slow down and ruminate. It bothers me every time I see the "X min read" labels attached to articles on this platform, and it bothers me even more that I respond to them and defer reading 15+ minute articles until later (=never). The internal monologue is being replaced by incessant consumption, so it's no wonder people are losing the tools to express themselves. I wouldn't so much mind the kids I teach calling each other "bruh" in class if their attention spans could at least last more than thirty seconds at a time.
The demise of traditional forms of publishing (also brought about by the social media revolution) has a part to play too in the perceived decline of language. Average people always spoke in ways that were sloppy and unpublishable, while literature gave language the opportunity to reach its most sublime heights. But the modern style of writing, both in formally published works and in exchanges between persons, involves transcribing the way we speak on paper. When writing itself is so uninspired, our speech will never rise to meet it.