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Newnewspeak
January 05, 2025

grape corn artistic ninja unalives yt yahtzee

What a time to be alive!

I can create content on my desk here using my handheld computer, edit it with my desktop computer, upload it to a series of other computers tied together, and get it seen by, like, three people across the world! (hi, mom).

I can make anything! I can do anything! I can find anything! The world is more connected and communicative than ever! We live in a utopia! It's like when you're playing that one game with the dice and you get all five of them to be the exact same value ... Yahtzee?

Yes! The internet is my oyster! I bet there's a bunch of Yahtzee content online. And if not, I can MAKE some! Watch! I like youtube so I'll use their acronym in my search. All I have to look for is "yt yahtzee" and . . .

Oh ... oh, boy.

Something happened to our language online. Certain topics are discussed through a sort of rhyming slang. Others use emoji. A rare few use ... rhyming emoji. What the heck is happening to the English language?

First, a tangent: In the infant days of the internet, people would use attach their computers to landline phones and call into computers that hosted discussions, files, and more. People were able to look for different things using primitive, local search engines and often times could find illicit stuff when they knew where to look.

As the legend goes, people hosting this illicit stuff needed a way to help hide their activity. They would mask the things they were hiding by taking the name of a file, switching the case on certain letters, and sometimes replacing letters with numbers. This would give them something that would be hidden to basic search algorithms, but human eyeballs could pick out.

It was called "l33tsp3ak," and it's still used the world over. For example, you may find yourself using it as you struggle to find a unique username on any popular website.

If you were looking up "Loni Anderson nude," for example, you may not find anything. But in browsing around you happen to find a "l0n1 And3rs0n n00d.bmp," you'd send a command to download the picture and get treated to some saucy 2-color softcore porn ... ten minutes later. It was the infant internet, we measured bandwidth in individual bytes per second back then.

Now, computer algorithms are continuing to dictate how we say things. In order to avoid getting hunted down and deplatformed, people take to social media with a new generation of euphemisms:

- It's not sex, it's "seggs."
- White people are "yts".
- Yahtzee talk isn't discussing the dice game, but instead the German fascists that lost World War 2.
- Talking about the COVID-19 pandemic became heated discussions about the global "panini."

This gets broken further down into the use of emojis:

- People's private areas are referred to as an eggplant, peach, or cherries.
- Sexual assault, when it isn't abbreviated to SA, is now grapes.
- Black people get ninjas, which would be awesome if people didn't know the history behind its near-homophone.

The name "algospeak" is kicked around for this new generation of computer-dodging communication. People trying to talk about sensitive topics are sometimes shoehorned to use these synonyms to avoid getting deplatformed, banned, or worse, expelled from middle school.

For the most part, this author sees this phenomenon as a natural extension of language. There is one bit of algospeak that makes the hairs on the back of my head stand up, however:

Unalive.

It's tied to death, and often the more specific suicide. Unalive also sounds like it came out of the newspeak dictionary from George Orwell's 1984. In that book, one of the ways people were subjugated by the government was through a progressive dumbing-down of language.

This kept them from communicating with the nuance or emotional depth of today's English. You aren't ideologically sound, you have goodthink. It's not brisk outside, it's pluscold. The play wasn't terrible, it was doubleplusungood.

It makes me think: what if it's not the government who tries to control what we say and think about, but the corporations that host our modern means of communication? Are we on the way to only using emoji to convey our emotions? If so, that makes me *sad emoji*

On the other hand: algospeak allows some types of communication to flourish in places they typically would be restricted. Where rules dictate people can't discuss certain topics, these euphemisms give people a chance to conversations where they typically can't.

Sensitive topics can't be ignored. They have to be handled delicately, and they have to be handled. If we as people continue to find workarounds to the suppression of speech, that gives me *hopeful emoji*.

Just, for fucks sakes, can we stop venerating Yahtzees? I know it's cool when you roll five dice to have the same value in three tries but COME ON

                   

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