The best way to understand culture is trying to begin to understand the lopsided station wagon of language. What do we speak—and why do we speak it the way we speak it? Can one suffix help enable the speakers of a language to convey a range of emotions? Our ringside view of rapidly evolving digital parlance—as witnessed in the kind of words and communication patterns newer generations adopt—has become clearer and clearer thanks to social media. The skibidi-storm of Gen Alpha hasn’t even settled, and we have the latest entrant in the cipher of internetspeak—6/7.
Sumanto Chattopadhyay is gently nodding as I make my way through the bafflement of that question. The ad man, actor and language maven recently came out with Stories of Words and Phrases, his book dissecting the origins of everyday words and phrases that we use in modern English. It’s a culmination of his long-running blog The English Nut (@theenglishnut on Instagram).
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Why does every generation need a new way to speak? Why did Gen Z need to invent ‘no cap’ when they wanted to say ‘for real’? Is it out of the need for a break from meaning and academic seriousness?
“I think that every, you know, as every generation comes of age, they’re very rebellious. And they just they find adults to be the root of all evil in their lives. So, the language they invent is just something of their own—their own private, exclusive language. It’s a way of keeping the older generations out,” says Chattopadhyay.
A little while ago, he recalls, his video on Gen Z lingo ended up annoying a lot of his older-generation followers. “They said, ‘This is rubbish, we never want to learn this. We’re skipping this episode because it’s complete rubbish!”
Experiencing vexation at the supposed decay of language as one knew it is not a new feeling. After the response to the video, Chattopadhyay did some more research and confirmed that today’s quirky is tomorrow’s mainstream. “Every generation comes up with its own slang. Most of it doesn’t last very long. But a few of them become included in formal language, like the word ‘fake’. Even the word ‘job’, which is now so essential to us, comes from jobbery, which used to mean a shady sort of work.”
About a couple of years ago, the internet first heard of the proudly and profoundly meaningless skibidi. Based on younger, chronically online social media users’ lessening need of valid reasoning for new coinages, one can vaguely surmise that it has an onomatopoeic origin. It first appeared in Dom Dom Yes Yes, a nonsense song by the Bulgarian singer Biser King.
“It is [onomatopoeic]. I follow this guy on Instagram and, he talks a lot about the Indian roots of the Roma people in Europe. And he actually explained that this skibidi is actually a Romani language thing. And it’s from scatting—he showed a clip of Indian classical musicians, and when they’re singing the sa-re-ga-ma notes, they start using other sounds. It comes from that.”
Chattopadhyay particularly enjoys going into the origins of modern-day terms such as Bluetooth (coined after the nickname of a 10th-century Danish king who united the warring people of Scandinavia) and phrases like ‘caught red-handed’, first used as such in Sir Walter Scott’s novel Ivanhoe. The phrase initially referred to crimes that involved illegal killing of animals on royal lands, or just murder.
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The insistence on correctness and rules around grammar and convention are in fast-fade mode. Some of it is thanks to the postcolonial need for democratising English as a modern lingua franca. Some of it due to the growing uptake of artificial intelligence. Chattopadhyay is among the declining number of custodians of the idea of language, a passionate campaigner of English itself. The display picture on the Instagram page for The English Nut is a Shakespeare vector, its Van Dyke beard a nod to Chattopadhyay himself.
“A writer once described English as a great mongrel. Like many other parts of the world, when they looted India, they also looted a lot of words—like jungle, bungalow, kachehri and loot itself. The word dungaree, which referred to these precursors of jeans, comes from Dongri in Bombay, where they had the docks, where the workers would make bottoms out of this thick, rough fabric. Also, that’s where it got exported from,” he says.
This porosity is the reason the other colonial linguistic superpower—French—lost out to English, says Chattopadhyay. “The French were so precious about saying ‘no’. I lived in French Canada at one point, and people would say ‘bon weekend’ because they borrowed the English word. But in France, people used to be very particular to say ‘fin de semaine’ or ‘bonne fin de semaine’ because they were very particular about not allowing many foreign words to enter the language. And so, the French lost ground to English, which has, sort of, said, ‘Bring it on’. That’s why it’s got such a huge vocabulary that’s still growing.”
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French, however, did contribute a huge part of English vocabulary—including everyday words like ‘omelette’, ‘attaché’ and ‘café’. “Which must make them even more resentful that after all of that, English overtook French as the international language,” he quips.
Despite the Anglophilic link, where Chattopadhyay and his book ultimately nudge us is to think more about language and the stories hidden behind its immediate semantic palimpsest. Take, for instance, the word ‘safari’, which we commonly link with the Arabic/Persian word safar, meaning journey.
“But safari is a Swahili word from East Africa because the Arab traders had a huge influence of trading all sorts of things among, sadly, slaves. So, Swahili is a sort of link language because all the tribes in East Africa had their own different languages.”
“When the Arabs had to deal with those tribes, there was no common language and, so, this chutney language was created—a combination of words from different tribal languages as well as Arabic and English. For example, in Swahili you say habari, which means ‘how are you’, but it comes from ‘khabar’ in Arabic.”
Which was how safar became safari in Swahili and was then adopted by English. “Now, if you’re going to Africa to see wild animals, you go for a safari. Whereas in India, it became safar, which is closer to the pure Persian or Arabic word.”
And then, there’s the fact about curiosity for language and having a way with words adding to your debonair appeal.
“Ultimately, what separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom is our facility with language. I think that it’s how precisely and elegantly you can explain something or say something, is ultimately what makes you stand apart. I mean, it makes you a great communicator. Even like if you're a student, you know that the teachers who were able to really capture your imagination is because it's the same thing that was being explained maybe by other teachers using dull, boring language. And then there's one person who used just the precise words, the right words to get something across.”