Language

“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. ...

Part of Changing Language, a series about how public English shifts, hardens, and leaves old objections behind. Call an intentional workaround a loophole and some people still react like you just misused a technical term in court. They hear the word and insist it must refer only to a drafting defect, an omission, or a badly written law. That objection is not crazy. It is just too narrow for the way the word actually works now. ...

There is a collective hallucination currently infecting our cultural memory. If you listen to modern media or scroll through “revised” history on social media, you’d be led to believe that the slang of the late 20th century was only used by a handful of fringe bigots or “problematic” outliers. That is a flat-out lie. The reality is much simpler, much more pervasive, and much more uncomfortable for the “virtue” era to swallow: for decades, words like gay and retarded were the undisputed, universal standard protocol for every kid in the country. ...