Who is “chat”?

“When you speak to chat, you are assembling your audience,” writes Kate Lindsay. This essay originally ran in Embedded.  

When I was growing up, I remember one of my friend’s moms telling me that she read a headline predicting that my generation’s relentless use of cell phones was going to change the finger we use to point. Instead of our index fingers, we’d point with our thumbs, since that’s what we use to tap and type. That, uh, never happened, but ever since then I have been interested in the ways humans might adapt to technology. 

My near-constant use of screens has affected my vision. A few years ago my doctor instructed me to make a point, when I went on walks, to look at the faraway tops of buildings so my eyes retained the ability to see subjects in the distance. For others, the rise of “digital amnesia” is affecting their memories. Even the Millennial pause is one of these symptoms—in that case, a holdover from an earlier digital age.

I actually view these changes pretty neutrally, since they’re happening in response to our environment. But the one area that’s been affected most is speech. Social media is not just changing how we talk, but also who we talk to. That is, the “chat.” 

“He,” “she,” and “them” refer to specific people; this new pronoun (?) is more ambiguous. Originally a reference to the chat boxes that accompany livestreams, YouTube videos, and the like, to address the “chat” now is to address anyone in earshot. “Y’all” is “you all”; “chat” is anyone or, as a recent tweet noted, “everyone ... no matter what gender or pronouns or age or amount of people. 1 person or 8294 people.” When you speak to chat, you are assembling your audience. It’s language meant to address a contained community, but also used, winkingly, outside of that community on the feed or IRL. 

It’s up to the reader to decide if chat means them. “Chat what Hozier song is this,” a viral quote tweet of two skeletons embracing reads. 

The true classification of this word is frequently debated in the linguistics subreddit. “‘Chat’ is just a noun, used as a vocative,” a user wrote. “Sure it may refer to some sort of ‘4th person’ although I feel like ‘indefinite addressee"’ suits it better. In this sense it is not different from ‘guys’ or anything else used as an apostrophe, it's just that it refers to something that doesn't physically exist.”

I won’t quibble on the specifics—I’m more interested in the widespread adoption of the phrase and what that says about the future of digital language. 

“Linguistically, the dialect of English spoken by contemporary adolescents is rapidly moving further away from the vernacular of the canonical works we ask them to read,” teacher Carrie M. Santo-Thomas wrote earlier this month in response to an Atlantic piece she was quoted in. “While this has always been true to some degree, social media and technology have sped up language evolution and widened the gap between English dialects.” 

Here’s the part of what Santo-Thomas wrote that most interested me: “My students code switch into my spoken dialect to engage with me, something that I never had to do to communicate with my teachers in high school.”

Every generation creates its own slang words, and for most of my life, those words have originated on the internet. But when I think of just how many terms I went through this year—coconut tree, “show me to me rachel,” “me!” (a la Four Seasons baby)—I can only imagine what someone learning English is going through. Internet terms are peppered throughout my traditional English, but for the incoming generation, internet terms might be their traditional English. While reports of Gen Alpha’s use of words like “skibidi” or “rizz” are likely exaggerated, there’s some truth to the inscrutability of their language, as evidenced by these signs I’ve seen up in teacher’s classrooms. 

@thatpinkscienceteacher

Words that are forbidden in my class #firstyearteacher #teacher #teachertok #teachersoftiktok #teacherlife

And when I reflect on my time in high school, I agree with Santo-Thomas—while I definitely spoke more formally to my teachers, I did not have to code switch. My personality was the same, and at most, the new words my teachers needed to understand were ones like “legit,” short for “legitimate,” and not “gyatt,” short for…..?? 

Make no mistake: I think this is fascinating! And I certainly don’t think it’s a signifier of any kind of societal decline. The frustrations older generations have with the speech of the younger is, I imagine, mostly rooted in a frustration with not understanding. As our English dialects widen, it will become harder to communicate without one of us code switching—and I’ll tell you now, I won’t be the one saying “gyatt.” 

PLAYBACK

Snippets of streaming news — and what we’re streaming.

• The Blair Witch Project is being rereleased with 90 minutes of deleted footage (Gizmodo)

• “There’s a joke here about what women can get away with, wrapped in tulle and wearing an unwavering smile, unconvincing as it may be.” Kara Rota on The Substance (LARB)

• Kelly Moran and Flore Laurentienne on The Lot Radio (YouTube)

• “Punish” by Ethel Cain (Spotify)

• “Mysterious Machines” - Oh No, Mandrassi (Spotify)

• Welcome 2 Norway - Ol’ Burger Beats (Spotify)

MIXTAPE

Good links from the Dirtyverse.

• George Packer says The Magic Mountain saved his life (The Atlantic)

• “It seems to me that belief in an actually existing God is only necessary to take mysticism seriously if you understand the divine in that very particular way—as opposed to believing in a more expansive interpretation that might include the feeling of earthly love, immersion in nature, dancing all night, doing drugs, or, like Critchley, having a sacred experience with art.” (Bookforum)

• Ezra Klein on Bidenomics (Odd Lots)

• New Jersey’s Star-Ledger is ending its print edition (NJ dot com)

• 21,000 laborers have died working on Saudi Vision 2030 (The Architect’s Newspaper)

  • Read Walden Green on NEOM

• “Once I wanted to tell a story about how I became the thing that grows rather than the dirt.” (The Account Magazine)

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