The English language has always been an open house, welcoming words from Greek, Latin, Hindi, Urdu, and lately, the internet.
Its generosity is unmatched – it borrows freely, never returns, and calls the loot enrichment. Every generation adds its slang and scrambles the syntax, but the present one seems to be doing it at the speed of a teraflop.
A language that never says no to visitors
Merriam-Webster’s latest Collegiate Dictionary is a fine reflection of how English has stopped walking and started doomscrolling. It now has rizz (charm, especially in flirting), delulu (short for delusional), touch grass (go offline and get a life), and mouse jiggler (for those pretending to work from home).
Even the once dignified petrichor – that lovely scent after rain – now sits alongside dad bod and ghost kitchen, words that would make Shakespeare drop his quill and order a cold brew on Swiggy or Zomato.
The WhatsApp generation dictionary
It is the tech-savvy youth who are minting these expressions through their messaging. WhatsApp today is what the Elizabethan tavern once was. New idioms hatch there daily, die by evening, and yet somehow find their way into the dictionary.
Parents, meanwhile, still trying to decode LOL, are now confronted with broligarchy, skibidi and tradwife. The gap between generations is no longer cultural – it is linguistic.
Words of our times
The language mirrors the times: doomscroll and WFH came from the pandemic, forever chemical from the climate crisis, and hard pass from the universal fatigue of saying no politely.
If earlier we had poetry and prose, we now have posts and reels. Words like snackable define not food but our attention span – short, crisp, and vanishing.
Dictionaries that scroll faster than we read
Even the high tables of lexicography have started bowing to memes. Cambridge has skibidi on its watchlist; Oxford recently went with brain rot as word of the year, while The Economist offered kakistocracy – government by the worst – which some might say has global application. And who can forget enshittification, that elegant description of how online platforms decay by their own greed?
English, clearly, is no longer a language. It is a group chat in progress. Dictionaries now do what archaeologists once did: unearth the slang of civilizations still alive.
The truck stops here
And now, joining this lexical carnival is Smita Prakash, who recently added her own to the evolving glossary of digital brevity. Her X post read: ‘Dukhi atmas outraging on my mentions, the truck I care for your validation.’
Looked for a context for her outrage, but there was hardly any hint. Or did I miss something?
So, will truck roll over the usages I care a fig or I don’t give a (profanity)? A one-line snipe like this fits her pattern of answering broad criticisms rather than identifying an individual.
In any case, it lands neatly in the new lexicon of online repartee – a kind of modern-day Elizabethan insult, compressed into 280 characters and one indignant emoji short of Shakespearean drama.
(With inputs from dictionary publishers and media reports.)
