The top ten words used in 2015
Digital wallet
Doge
Drunk text
Feels
Fleek
IRL
SMH
What do you mean
Why you always lying
Yas queen
Language emerging on social media and the internet are increasingly entering our common use where we find ourselves speaking in a similar way as we do online. This publication serves to examine some of the trending words that had interwoven into our daily lexicon, shedding light on the way we conceive the world and the nuances of our lexicon.
It is interesting also to note that some of the informal or slang terms added in the year 2014 by Oxford Dictionaries include bank of mum and dad, half-ass, cray, sext, hot mess, mansplain, side-eye with side boob being one of the favourite phrases. The popularity of GIFs has extend even into research, journalism, or even to make art. In 2015, Riffsy users made more than 10 billion searches. When examining the volume of these searches, Riffsy unearthed a selection of the year’s most popular buzzwords and was able to chart their rise to vernacular stardom. (Yas Queen clinched the number one spot) Such method highlighted the role of social media in transmitting and popularizing new terms (yaasss, feels) and at the same time, demonstrated the new ways that technological innovation is changing the way we live and speak IRL (in real life). Our preoccupation with GIFS also shed light on our visually driven and rather obsessively immediate culture.
The publications are created in accordance to their popularity in 2016 where they are observed to have decreased quite a bit with the phrase "why you always lying" hitting rock bottom at 20% As such the size of it is made to reflect this decrease.
The Page Turner
Our attention span for content is in a dire state. While content and information have been more accessible than ever, most readers only spend a miserable fifteen seconds on an average article. Adapting what is known as the F reading pattern where they would quickly scan through the title and text for keywords. Such mechanical reading practices leaves scarcely more definite impression on the memory than does the act of washing dishes after meals or the jabbing of the elevator button.
In this compilation of binary codes1, it serves to question the way we consume online information. In this instance, the act of reading is being reduced and transposed to its most superficial level where one is captivated by the allure of flipping through the book without taking in anything.
