#language-change

#language-change

On Sunday, Merriam-Webster announced that "slop" is its 2025 Word of the Year, reflecting how the term has become shorthand for the flood of low-quality AI-generated content that has spread across social media, search results, and the web at large. The dictionary defines slop as "digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence."

With hundreds of lilts and cadences across our small island, the ever-changing sound of an Irish voice isn't a new phenomenon - and, of course, it's always the kids' fault

"If there's one thing I learned, it's just how sophisticated and complex the work of defining words is," Fatsis says.

Still, the idea that the spirit of a dead person or animal could return to the land of the living was present as far back as the ancient world, according to Morton, the author of Ghosts. The 19th century ushered in a cultural obsession with spiritualism. Ghosts peppered Victorian literature, and séances soared in popularity. The supernatural rituals, in which participants called upon the spirits of their deceased loved ones and others, challenged the idea that the living couldn't communicate with the dead, said Morton.

No one expects a teenager and a senior citizen to sound the same, but the question of exactly how age influences our language use is more complex than it might at first seem. A fascinating new study probes how specific life events and experiences might have more of an impact on your linguistic choices than your chronological age per se.

Aleksic identifies terms like 'seggs' and 'unalive' as part of a linguistic trend called algospeak, representing inventive workarounds for discussing sensitive topics online.