You Don't Know What "Riffing" Means (And Neither Did VICE)
“Riffing” gets thrown around constantly now: podcasters riff between ad reads, comedians riff off a bad heckle, and half of “prompting” a chatbot is really just riffing on whatever it hands back. The word is more common today than it was in 2013, and it’s still routinely used to mean the opposite of what it actually means. Nobody needs to have read a thirteen-year-old VICE essay to get that wrong. But that essay happens to be the cleanest, most confident example of the mistake ever put into print. That’s what got us thinking about it in the first place. ...