Slang as sorcery

As a writer, I love words. I collect the ones I like the sound of, like verisimilitude or pareidolia, on my phone. I am used to coming across new ones that turn out to be old (or at least older than me). Born in 1997, I am officially Gen Z. I thought I was ‘up-to-the-minute’ until I had to Google ‘NPC’.

I realised I wasn’t encountering a new word, but a new world. NPC (a Non-Player Character in a video game) is used to describe someone who lacks independent thought, like a background extra in a film about someone else’s life. Coming across this term in the wild challenges the fallacy of digital dualism, the idea that the ‘online’ world is fake and the ‘offline’ world is real. Definitions born on screens are becoming the dominant reality.

It’s easy to dismiss terms like ‘ghosting’ or ‘slay’ as lazy linguistic shortcuts. But they are actually tools for controlling the narrative. I remember how at school my friends and I used ‘basic’ to dismiss what we considered mainstream, or ‘FML’ to turn minor setbacks into shared tragedies. Or how some twins I knew invented their own language as a shield against the uncertainties and banalities of the adult world.

This is where sorcery comes in. The word abracadabra is derived from the Hebrew phrase avra kehdabra, meaning ‘I create as I speak’. In philosophy, J.L. Austin calls this a performative utterance, speech that doesn’t just describe a situation, but actively changes it (like saying “I do” at a wedding, or “you’re fired” to an employee). When students redefine syntax or invent acronyms, they are engaging in performative utterance. They are casting a spell of autonomy, asserting their power to define the world rather than just inhabit it.

By making their language difficult to understand, students create a space safe

The opacity of this emerging lexicon acts as a kind of defence mechanism. By making their language difficult to understand, students create a space safe from being co-opted, packaged, or judged by the establishment.

The contrast between the clarifying power of language and its capacity to obscure, exposes a deeper conflict regarding the purpose of language here at TU Delft. On one hand, scientific inquiry demands transparency. Language must be clear enough to ensure reproducibility and be understood by the wider community. On the other, the institutional machine, driven by the market forces of global rankings and student recruitment, demands language that is legible and persuasive, packaged for instant consumption. Student slang challenges both. It is neither peer-reviewed nor marketable. It is encrypted.

At TU Delft we celebrate innovation. We should therefore view student lexicon not as a bug in the system, but as a feature. We do not need to adopt the terms ourselves (nothing kills a slang term faster than an older person using it) and should challenge language that is exclusionary or damaging. But we might respect the mechanics at play. We have the privilege of witnessing a new generation engineer its own reality, just as we once engineered ours.