I’ve been thinking recently about the ebb and flow of language, how certain phrases pass out of use and others persist, how new slang is always being created to fill gaps. 

Take “set your watch,” for example. I’ve been wearing a windup watch lately, because I like it and it can be easier to check than a phone, but I’m forever checking it against other clocks because I forget that I need to wind it or it slows down and before I’ve noticed it’s running two minutes late. 

To continue that tangent — setting a clock to the exact time is something that grew out of time zones, which came into being after the advent of continent-wide train travel made it necessary to ensure people could keep to a schedule. These days, with world-wide travel, activity, and connectivity, it’s a good thing that most timekeeping devices are synchronized via satellite. But it does mean that the phrase will soon probably not be necessary. 

On a similar note, I recently realized that my father’s tendency to joke “look that up in your Funk and Wagnalls” is just the forerunner to “Google it!” It makes me wonder how much longer it’ll be before Google follows the same route into obscurity. 

Or maybe it won’t fall into obscurity, but only because it took on a completely different tone. Language doesn’t exactly follow a linear route. Like the word “nimrod” — it’s only an insult because when the phrase was first used, courtesy of one Bugs Bunny on a Looney Tunes short with Elmer Fudd, people didn’t recognize it as a reference to Nimrod, a mythical hunter. And it’s caught on widely, making its way into numerous other works right along with casual slang, such that the improper noun is now the primary definition on the Oxford dictionary. Thanks, Bugs.

While it may not hold quite the same prestige as its British forerunner, the online Urban Dictionary is updated every day, accumulating hundreds of thousands of new words every month. Most of them probably won’t persist for even a year —like hippomonstrosesquippodaliophobia, a rather counter-intuitive term for a fear of very long words — but some definitely have sticking power. 

And that’s not even touching on the new words and definitions for gender and sexuality that are emerging and gaining traction as people who might not have even known that other people like them existed without the internet to connect with each other and build communities. The collective vocabulary of the English language is expanding faster and faster every day, at blink-and-you’ll-miss-it speeds.

The internet has brought another new unique phenomenon, which is chatspeak—acronyms like LOL, or BRB, developed for speedy communication in a textual medium. A few of them are even making the jump to verbal communication, just because people find them useful for conveying particular emotions or tones. As more people grow up talking online, they might become even more prominent.

And then, just like the idea of setting one’s watch to something other than the noon sun, they might fade after a couple of centuries when they’re no longer useful.