One of the many reasons I don’t use TikTok is its propensity to get carried away with itself linguistically. A group of users will experience a behaviour for the first time and invent a name for it, thinking they’re the first people to experience it.
A few years ago, we heard quiet quitting, which bears a strong resemblance to what trade unionists have called work-to-rule for decades. More recently, Main character syndrome has appeared, and that’s barely distinguishable from self-importance.
Of the many terms churned out in an average year, it’s likely a few will gain long-term traction. Look at podcast, which originated in 2004 and has definitively outlived the iPod itself. My bet is that doomscrolling will be the next to stick around because it describes a behaviour that didn’t exist in the context of newspapers and magazines. Going back even further, we still film motion pictures and dial numbers, both derived from the original design of these devices.
Park that thought while I go further back into history.
Between approximately the years 1400 and 1700, the English language experienced the Great Vowel Shift, where the pronunciation of certain words gradually changed generation by generation. Nobody knows for certain why it happened, and it wouldn’t have been a problem had the printing press not been introduced less than a century into the shift.
In 1476, William Caxton opened England’s first printing press in Westminster. I’m oversimplifying here, but many spellings used in that geographical area were fossilised in printed works while this shift was still happening. This is partly to blame for the inconsistent spelling we still endure in English, so meat rhymes with greet, but not bleak with steak. The first dictionaries only appeared more than 100 years later.
There have been surprisingly few co-ordinated attempts to rectify this. A notable exception is the English Spelling Society, which has been working on the problem since 1908. It’s the written form of our language where the problem lies, less so the spoken form.
Pronunciation can and does change on a microscopic level from time to time. As Dr Geoff Lindsey explains in this video, the word covert moved from ‘CUV-vert’ to ‘CO-vert’ in the space of a generation. The linked video highlights an interesting crossover, where the word appears in a conversation between President John F. Kennedy and Lieutenant General Marshall S. Carter. The younger Kennedy uses the older version, yet the older Carter says it the modern way.
So my mad proposal is to harness the tendencies of TikTok to complete the Great Vowel Shift that should have been settled by 1700.
As the platform is capable of popularising terms such as quiet quitting and main character syndrome in a matter of months rather than generations, then let’s put it to work. Set enough users the challenge to reform the spelling of awkward words and I think we would see a good enough consensus.
It wouldn’t be perfect, but it would likely be better than we have. Even languages with broadly consistent spelling often have a few quirky pronunciations in the most common words.
If TikTok can finish the job before the English Spelling Society, then I shall quietly quit this topic.
