Elise Hu

As an etymologist, how are you managing the speed at which things are changing?

Right.

And it strikes me that everything is changing.

Like we're talking just within a matter of days, a trend can emerge and then be gone and then be considered passe or old, which is at a much faster cadence and speed than, say, academia, where language was traditionally researched and linguistics was studied.

What do you feel like are some trends this year in language that have come up and have really hit the zeitgeist that you have to explain the most?

Okay.

I'm trying to go through what I'm hearing in my house that sounds like nonsense because I have a 13-year-old and a 10-year-old and an 8-year-old.

Yeah, I do like being called chat, though, instead of mom.

Oh, okay.

So when I'm referred to as chat, it's from like a live streamer typically saying like, hey, don't forget to subscribe.

Yeah.

I mean, there's the panopticon element of it, but it also strikes me as fascinating that so many young people today, when you ask them what they want to be when they grow up is a YouTuber, right?

Or to go viral or to be an influencer.

So now our life aspirations aren't a particular virtue.

but instead to be seen.

In your talk, you focus on how LLMs, large language models, and chatbot AIs are affecting speech, affecting the way we talk.

How do you think it's going to change our language practices in the future?

Yeah, it's this loop, right?

It's this unending funhouse mirror or feedback loop of our language.

We feed it, it feeds us back to us from like an aggregated data set.