So far studies have been limited, and findings contradictory. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon took a statistical look at language used on Twitter over the course of a month last year and concluded that regionalisms not only still exist but are continuing to develop. Northern Californians tend—no surprise—to be "hella" tired, while New Yorkers are "deadass" tired and Angelenos are "tired 'af.'" "Y'all" is, of course, Southern; yinz is characteristic of Pittsburgh; and references to soda (general), pop (Midwest) and Coke (South) also conform to the Harvard Dialect Survey. But the abbreviation for cool in Northern California is written as koo; in Southern California it's coo. And "suttin"—a new discovery—pops up in New York City and Boston.

Meanwhile, and conversely, a British sociolinguistics expert argues that social media is actually spreading (and thus diluting) regionalisms (such as Cornwall's "dreckly," to use an overseas example). "'Twitter, Facebook and texting all encourage speed and immediacy of understanding, meaning users type as they speak, using slang, dialect respellings and colloquialisms,'" said Dr. Erik Schleef. "'The result is we are all becoming exposed to words we may not have otherwise encountered, while absorbing them into everyday speech.'" A Guardian critic disputes his claim, ascribing the spread of Welsh terms to "old-fashioned television."

Tracking regional slang and usage in any reliable way has always been cumbersome and time-consuming; the difficulty lies in “bring[ing] linguistic geography down to a human scale.” Entries in the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE), for instance, “have a homespun texture, demanding [that readers] reconcile various types of information in order to understand what DARE has to say about a word or phrase. … A DARE entry might include any combination of quotations from regional literature, diaries, small-town newspapers, material from WELS, the various linguistic atlases (published and unpublished), other accounts of dialect in scholarly literature, substantial personal collections donated to the project by scholars at the ends of their careers … and, of course, questionnaire responses, identified by informant, so that the curious reader can refer to the ‘List of Informants’ to discover his or her community, community type, year of birth, level of education, occupation, sex, and race—all types of information that can be overlooked in other historical dictionaries.” The profusion of real-time evidence accumulating on Twitter and Facebook must be a treasure trove for linguists and dialectologists, or at least it will be once they decide exactly how to sift and evaluate it.

I’m no scholar, just a language enthusiast. I was born in Dallas, to a Texan and a Mississippian, and raised in Miami—which is a whole 'nother country—and there was enough regional incompatibility between the way people spoke in my house and how they spoke outside it that as a child I spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to erase any markers of what I thought of as hickishness from my speech. As I’ve gotten older, and more interested in talking the way I actually think, a slew of Texan expressions and indicators of Southernness have made their way back into my conversation, and I’m increasingly fascinated by accents, dialects and regionalisms.

Here in Brooklyn, where I've lived for twelve years, at least half the people I meet are transplants, and I’m constantly embarrassing my husband and friends by trying to guess where strangers are from. The more subtle the cues, the greater the fun.

Judging from my random wanderings on Twitter, this annoying hobby of mine isn’t as unusual as I’ve been led to believe. A vast cross-section of users are slang detectives—or police or thieves. Some taunt followers from other places who use unfamiliar words; some get annoyed when people elsewhere appropriate their regional lingo; some openly seek to fill out their repertoire, constantly picking up new words from their stream or their vacations. Others suffer from slang anxiety, and some of these seek advice, and they are in luck: people love to hold forth, with or without prompting, on all matters relating to language. Arguments erupt; proclamations are made; contempt and paranoia flourish. "Wondering how many followers are 'eating' off my tweets," says Deshair, who remembers when "Urban slang took at least two years to go mainstream. By the time the mainstream got to it, Urban mouths were done with it."

Here, loosely categorized, are some of my favorite regional slang tweets, collected over the past six months or so. I found all, or nearly all, of these by searching Twitter for anyone using the word "slang."

HANDS OFF OUR SLANG

If you’re not from here, you can’t say that, is a common refrain on Twitter, and New Yorkers may be the most possessive of all. Chelseas_Unique, for example, wants Californians to lay off her lingo. “Since when does ppl in LA say OD? That's NY slang yo.” And a nostalgic New York expat wishes people in Florida would stop saying "corny & that's poppin & you already... that's ny slang."

There’s plenty of attitude flowing back at New Yorkers, though; San Antonio hip-hop artist Question210 (above) isn’t the only Texan who’s touchy about New York City rappers using Texan slang. Houston/Missouri City writer _brandoc goes on a tear, arguing that “a Southern act rocking hoodies & timbs and jacking NYC slang, [we'd] laugh at him straight to the bank,” but when Northerners do it, “in the land of co-op (where everyone needs to be socialist to succeed apparently), nobody will call it for what it is": “An act. Every act that comes to Texas will INSTANTLY adopt to Texan slang & culture to fit the f-ck in and we'll let them run w/ it cause..." (next tweet) "'If they blow up, we blow up.’ No idiot, if you blow up, YOU blow up. They blow up because THEY blow up.”

And these aren’t just East Coast-West Coast and North-South concerns. "#PLAGIARISM,” qno_rico says, retweeting PrettyMoneyyy11: “I hate when Clarksville [Mississippi] people use Memphis slang. It's awkward."

“OMG,” DeliciousDai chides Ngallaway62, “please stick to your own wack-ass Michigan slang.... don't try to jock our shit.” Which leads to the next category…


GET OUTTA HERE WITH THAT CRAP SLANG

People in this camp aren’t so much protecting their native slang as dissing somebody else’s. “Slurred?” a St. Louis girl says to Awe_Okay (who’s announced plans to get “sluuuurrrrred this weekend.!!!!!!!!!!!!!”). “Thas some Alabama slang? -____- yur stl card has been revoked." “Alabama slang is really bothering me ijus cant get wit it,” says SLmChanceIFall, who’s “#GermanyRaised” but lists her location as “IDGAF Avenue, Atlanta.”

"I hate when Miami boys start saying bro... Using up north slang... Nigga you know we don't call each other bro down here ‘that's gay,’" beautiful_kj announces. (Actually, when I was growing up in South Florida, “bro” was everywhere, but then, I am old.) AyNnandi contends that "Ppl from jersey just shouldnt say jawn” –a term, discussed at length below, that most people on Twitter seem to associate with nearby Philly –“some slang is best left where its from & i SWEAR if NJ nigz start sayin ‘Joe’ im dippin to Cali."

Kentuckian irishrover85 is amused by and a little disdainful of an acquaintance’s use of the word “reckon”: " Maybe this goes to show he has been IN Tx too much...he's starting to pick up the slang lol."

When AllUpOnYoTL complains that “‘Nobody ever understands Louisiana slang,’” DdotBurns doesn’t have much sympathy; “nobodi understand crackhead slang,” he quips.

Sometimes people actually threaten violence. WCMurdaHD tells DeeGlow, “she sey one more english word .. matta fact even a GT slang.. mi ah go hold on pon she neck like a necklace.. #Fact...” And Michael Schaub is, as always, succinct and hilarious in this double-edged tweet: "Americans who use British slang sound like bloody wankers."


SLANG ANXIETY

Being a neurotic person myself, I empathize with people like missjure (above) who want to be sure they’re not making asses of themselves—especially if they’re talking about coitus. And kissmybeautie’s complaint is fair enough. "I get so irked when the white kids at my school look/act funny whn I say a slang thy don't know -___- like really, use context clues."

Still, I was surprised by the high level of naked slang anxiety. "I need to catch up on this Philly Slang. I don't understand half of the words yall be saying :/" confesses _BooTATlicious_. “Is #DMV slang really that hard to understand cuz people from other places be actin like I'm speaking Hebrew or something,” BreeDatDude jokes. ChellFromPhilly can relate: "Hate when people dont know what im talkin bout cuz of my ‘Philly Slang’. Lol im use to talkin like that i cant help it." As can Memphisite ThatRudeChick, who warns, "If you stay in Memphis...don't take the Memphis slang out of Memphis. TRUST ME, no one is gonna know what you're talking about."

IAmDeWitt has had enough of Baltimore. “Baltimore slang is so wierd. People keep asking do I want ’hacks..rosebuds...skittles’ lol I don't know what to say. Lls I'm just like ‘ehh.’" Poor Denny2live suffers from multi-region exposure: "i kno i sound crazy wen i talk cuz i got memphis ,st. louis n philly slang in me smh." And xXAEZillaXx has himself similarly all tied up in knots: "I just said ‘going ham’ in a sentence to myself and felt weird cuz I know that aint bay slang, yes im ignorant I can do that.”

Some tweets in this genre are difficult to parse. Neurosis, or humble-brag? "I'ma start using NY slang. It's bad enough some of my local Detroit natives think I'm from there -___________-" “Textin @stillpopularcuh gotta remember not to use the #Detroit slang since he's from #Vegas & #LongBeach nshit lol.”

Neurosis, or diss? “What on earth is a humdinger? Is this some sort of American slang I've never heard of?” "I wonder if the Ying Yang twins know that it's actually YIN and Yang. Or is there some Atlanta slang I'm unaware of?" "'Tiny Dancer, where you at?’ I'm right here? (New Orleans businessman finds humor in my obliviousness to N.O. slang.)”

For Louisiana transplant iKeepYOUChipper, anxiety becomes triumph: “I love how when I first came here everybody got on how California people talk & our slang is ‘dumb’ but NOW muhfuckass' using OUR shit smh.”


SLANG EDUCATION

If you ask Twitter where a word originated—and even if you don’t—Twitter will tell you. Or try to. Take “jawn,” a noun defined in Green's Dictionary of Slang (2011)—a book you can easily lose whole days in—as “an indiscriminate term, usu. used of something or someone that causes happiness, joy or excitement; also used as adj.” The supporting citation is a 2003 Urban Dictionary entry; usage is attributed to “U.S. campus.”

By general Twitter consensus, “jawn” is “super Philly slang” meaning “anything! a girl, song...anything loz or “a woman, place or thing.” The best example sentence I’ve seen is from tedwardhowell: "student, talking on phone in the hallway, just referred to an abscessed tooth as ‘that jawn I had before.’" There are dissenters from the broad definition, though: "Its philly slang means joint like that joint was poppin that jawn was poppin"; "I thought it was the sothern version of joint lol”; "Not from PA but its short for joint."

So Twitter’s pronouncements are inconsistent and sometimes unreliable. But they’re still fun to read. "Derrty, word, chuuch, mo, goosin are all St. Louis slang." "In my Miami slang: I'm so throwed. In my NY slang: I'm twistedddd." "Bogan Ipsum: The much funnier Australian slang version of lorem ipsum dummy text." "For those who don't know ’buttas’ is Philly slang for Constructs also known as Timbs." “‘What up doe’ That's that Detroit slang all the way in the A!! Money Greeting.” "Eminem was the first to say, ‘Good Lowdy Whody,’ not Big Sean. They are both from the D, so I guess that's Detroit slang." A heavily-retweeted list of “DMV slang” includes “Moe, Dew, Slim, Fool, Holmes, Go Smack, Joan, Oc, Fred, Dead, Live, Crack, Son, Fire up.” "DC got the best slang. ‘Son. Moe. Kill. Young. Stamp. On Who. Real Live. Dats Dead. #teamfollowback #instantfollow.” “In Atlanta it's ‘Rubber neckers,’ in Chicago, it's ‘Gaper's delay.’ Traffic slang!” "I need me a junt (memphis slang), a shawty (atl slang), a babooski (in my slang)... *sigh* WHERE YOU AT!" “Huff,” says Capt_Obvious, is Chicago slang “for wack, garbage, hella weak, etc." "In miami we got crippie n chronic." "New slang out here in Houston gnr RT @Sprincell What that mean RT @JDWeJam Just left paranormal activity.....”

And from the historical department: “an 1839 dict. of local slang has dropped on my desk. In the c19th North, twitter meant ‘to tremble’. In Craven, ‘uneasy’. So there you go."


SLANG COMPETITION, ACRIMONY AND CONFUSION

Slang talk gets exciting when people start arguing—not so much in the "we don't use wack slang in Brooklyn" vein, but smack-talking of the "Silence i dnt even use words like ‘green’.. I dnt do that memphis slang. DETROIT BITCH yeeaa" variety.

And it’s even more fun when tweeps disagree about word origins. "Shut up yo. That's east coast slang RT @VoCal_KiSS: Ppl from NY forever saying yo and ma, and kid. Who yall think y'all is? Lol #NYStandUp." "Eh hem...sorry sweetie...can't cosign that one. NY...YALL SEE THIS?? => RT @MzReminisce@RULERDIVINE I know but ‘nah mean’ is philly slang." "That's DC slang gurl.. ‘@AlannaDawkins: #thebait .. #lingo down here.. bait = hottie, attracts everyone.’"

Or authenticity: "If you're using NY slang and you're not from there, I won't take you seriously." “I'm glad I sound right when I curse & use slang because some of you be sounding so awkward it makes me uncomfortable.” “If you're a Detroit nigga talk like one, if you're a Vegas nigga talk like one...stop dicksuckin other peoples ‘slang’ .. tryna be cool -_-.”

A lot of these denunciations, passive-aggressively (or aggressively?) directed at entire Twitter streams, get no response. But it takes two for a misunderstanding. Here’s a lighthearted one between mikecane and JulietaLionetti that could’ve come from a Laurel & Hardy routine: “My foot. My foot. My foot. My foot. My foot.” “@JulietaLionetti Are you trying out American slang or have a podiatry problem?”

And here’s my favorite. Alas, Poor Roderick, she didn’t mean what he thought she meant: "we need to get up soon"; "we need to get up soon?? lol"; "yea as in meet up foo"; "oh ok must be that down south slang but yea we can do that no doubt."


SLANG OPPROBRIUM

Generally I disapprove of people who generally disapprove of slang, but some of the most cutting commentary on Twitter comes from this camp. My favorite example is above. More highlights: “scrap it? Dre you know I don't bang with slang. lol.” “Some of this Atlanta slang is just so extra and y'all sound dumb talking to me like that.” "'Aye watch dis' in the DMV means 'aye im bout to do something ignorant.'" “Try going to a job interview talking in all DMV slang...good luck.” “Some west-country bumpkins on the train are talking using london slang about mugging me and stealing my laptop!”

And then, from time to time, there are converts. "I hate Philly slang ‘jawn’ this & ‘drawlin’ that," said vivalacree_ just a couple days before trying it out for herself: "My new flat irons>>> them jawns is love! (Check me w/ my Philly slang ^_^)."

The best thing about the opprobrium camp is that it incites such great come-backs. "I may say some things in slang,” says TERMINATE_ALL, “but dont get things twisted I still have a very sophisticated vocabulary so dont play me like Im dumb."

First prize goes to Bronx native (and Buckaroo Banzai heroine, and one of my personal heroes) Ellen Barkin, for: "Would people stop calling me uneducated it offends my muthafuckin alma mater Hunter College." "Than stop using idiotic gansta wanna be dialect," said follower blindedbyblonde of Austin, who groused, when people pointed out that the proper word is "then," not "than": "Trying to correct tweet composition is like a nun trying to virginize ho's in a brothel."

Maud Newton is a writer and critic best known for her blog, where she has written about books since 2002.

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Schadenfreude? I asked. “That's the word,” she said. “I hear that, like, every day.” And she added, in her precise way, “Do you know how to spell it?”

While spelling the thing might be an issue, writers assume nowadays that when they say “schadenfreude,” readers know exactly what they mean. It’s defined as the “malicious enjoyment of the misfortunes of others” in the OED, which first included the word in 1982. The online OED traces key appearances of “schadenfreude” in English publications, the earliest of which is found in philologist Richard Chenevix Trench’s 1852 meditation on language, Study of Words. Trench's citation is mostly a lament. Words such as "schadenfreude," he remarks, reflect a degraded moral interiority: "… what a fearful thing is it that any language should have a word expressive of the pleasure which men feel at the calamities of others; for the existence of the word bears testimony to the thing."

While Trench lists other examples of words that express the “pleasure which men feel at the calamities of others” (in Greek and also Latin), only the German version has entrenched itself in the English lexicon. And it's not the only Germanism to do so—what might be surprising, though, is just how recently and rapidly such Germanisms have entered the American vocabulary. As we’ll see, while schadenfreude's use in English texts begins in the mid-1800s, it only started making regular appearances in the past three decades. (As I type, Microsoft Word does not recognize “Germanism” as a word, but it does accept “schadenfreude.”) So you might as well learn how to spell it, since Deutsch is, apparently, the way we talk about our feelings now.

In a 2009 After Deadline post titled "The Age of Schadenfreude," Times deputy news editor Philip B. Corbett observed:

Here’s an amazing fact: In 1980, according to our archive, the word “schadenfreude” did not appear in The New York Times. Not once.

This may seem hard to believe, since as a reader recently pointed out, we now appear to be living in the Golden Age of Schadenfreude. […]

In 1985, there was exactly one Times use of “schadenfreude,” in a Safire “On Language” column. In 1990, three uses, including one by an actual German. By 1995, we’re up to seven instances, still within reasonable limits for those who prefer their English mostly in English.

But the number begins to creep up in the late ’90s, then leaps to 28 in 2000. A brief decline in 2001, then another surge, to a record 40 uses in 2004. […]

So what’s with all the joy in pain? Is it something in the zeitgeist (62 uses in 2008, by the way)? Or is it just another verbal fad?

The Ngram for 'schadenfreude' corroborates Corbett’s observations:

While such statistics gesture toward an increase in the word’s use, they don’t explain the impetus behind its popularity.

Thomas Pynchon published his German-focused novel Gravity’s Rainbow in 1973 (back when 'schadenfreude' was nowhere to be found on the pages of the Times). While the text leaves many Germanisms undefined (Hexeszüchtigung, Wandervogel, Bürgerlichkeit, Brockengespenstphänomen), Pynchon nonetheless felt compelled to translate schadenfreude: “Like Adolf Hitler, Springer is easily tickled by what the Germans call Schadenfreude, the feeling of joy at another’s misfortune.” Pynchon presents schadenfreude as a malicious trait that's specifically German, one that has no English equivalent if only, to borrow Trench’s words, because the English “moral and spiritual condition” has yet a need to express itself in such terms. As the Spectator put it in 1926: “There is no English word for Schadenfreude, because there is no such feeling here.”

Such logic no longer holds up. We use the word a lot—most often in relation to celebrities (Sasha Frere-Jones once titled a post on Beyoncé simply “Schadenfreude”) and athletic events (the combination of competitive aggression and the likelihood of physical injury is probably to blame). Broadway is fertile grounds for the cultivation of schadenfreudistic sentiments. Michael Schulman’s New Yorker review of Julie Taymor’s 2011 production of Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark opens with the line: “New Yorkers excel at Schadenfreude.” Modulations of the word are also popular: You all remember Franzenfreude, of course? It was its own Twitter hashtag.

That feeling for when you come across a German word that signifies a human emotion mordantly paradoxical, and oh-so-human all at once? There ought to be a German word for that. Indeed, while the entire concept of the long-German-word-to-efficiently-express-complex-emotions has itself become a cliché, we continue to desire Germanisms that don't yet exist. Just a few days ago, this gem popped up on my Twitter feed:

Earlier this year, The Hairpin catalogued “German Words for Gchat-related Psychoemotional States,” while on this site, Balk has begun his own wish list for expressions to capture such emotions, to give one example, as "that sudden and jarring juxtaposition of feelings you experience when you finally realize that something you were certain was a parodic mash-up turns out to be absolutely sincere."

Websites such as The Neologist help people discover “the soothing power of the German compound noun” with words like Palmenbepflanztes Immobiliengefängnisn (palm-begrowthed real-estate prison) and wahlunfruchtbar (infertile by choice). And on. And on.

Many websites dedicated to Germanisms exist. Of course, websites on many, many topics exist—still, it makes sense that this particular language niche would hold a special interest to people who spend a lot of time on the Internet. The distance inherent in online interaction is perhaps conducive to the projective and prescriptive quality of Germanisms—where rigid words encapsulate elaborate feelings.

Cultural criticism on the infiltration of German words into English jargon emphasizes Germany’s role in the two World Wars: Did Germanisms emerge from the collective consciousness of a country seen, especially in the last century, as one full of complicated emotions? Scholarly research has taken up the matter. Jordan Finkin’s article “The Poetics of Schadenfreude” explores how post-Holocaust Yiddish poetry played on the “constraints and connotations […] of the German language and of the Germanic component in light of the Holocaust” for new poetic possibilities—a co-opting of the aggressor’s language. Many of the examples of “schadenfreude,” in the OED, after all, include Germany as the object of such sadism, with people rejoicing in the country's post-war status. To feel schadenfreude is to drawn a line between you and me—to separate your pain from my joy. The country that first articulated the perverse feeling of “schadenfreude” finds itself, in other languages, on its receiving end.

During the interwar year of 1920, Frederick Hamilton emphasized the philosophical distance between Germany and Britain:

The particular sentiment described in German as “Schadenfreude,” “pleasure over another's troubles” (how characteristic it is that there should be no equivalent in any other language for this peculiarly Teutonic emotion!), makes but little appeal to the average Briton.

By leaving Germanisms untranslated, one always points to the sentiment expressed by the word as fundamentally and even organically German. My favorite, “Vergangenheitsbewältigung,” means roughly to overcome or to come to terms with the past. The word is most frequently used in speaking about the Holocaust. Overcoming the burden of history is not a sentiment singular to any one nation, but focusing on its hyper-specific idiomatic expression in German makes this overcoming specific to Germany. “Vergangenheitsbewältigung” always refers back to its land of origin, reminding us of Germany’s associations and actions with regard to two World Wars.

Part of the reason we fixate on Germany is certainly social, but also linguistic: the German semantic structure lends itself to the invention of compound words. In Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon notes “the German mania for name-giving, dividing the Creation finer and finer, analyzing, setting namer more hopelessly apart from named.” Naming is not only a form of identification or labeling, but also of creation. To the eye, mouth, and ear, capacious German words seem to embody and externalize the weight of difficult emotions.

Yet German compound words are as strikingly direct as they are metaphysical. German poet and translator Paul Celan observes that German, “for all its inalienable complexity of expression, is concerned with precision. It does not transfigure, does not ‘poetize,’ it names and posits, it tries to measure the realm of the given and the possible.” “Schadenfreude,” after all, is comprised of “Schaden” (harm) and “Freude” (joy), while “Vergangenheitsbewältigung” links “Vergangenheit” (past) with “Bewältigung” (overcoming). Germanisms are direct and clear, yet, from the perspective of an outsider, visually and sonically convoluted; this allows us to use them with a sense of amused detachment. We borrow their sentiments with a self-consciousness that seems to say, "we don’t really own these complex dispositions, nor take responsibility for their proliferation."

Jane Hu is our official correspondent for very recent history.

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Facebook Groups have risen in opposition to this ubiquitous six-letter expression. There is "Irritated by the incorrect use of the word 'random,'" "I HATE the word 'random,'" "I HATE THE WORD RANDOM," "Society against the overuse of the word 'random,'" "Campaign against inappropriate use of the word 'random,'" and "NOT RANDOM."

Jackson Grant, a 27-year-old video producer from Australia, told me over the phone that he started "Australians against overuse of the word 'random'" one day after a co-worker had responded to a joke by saying "How random!" Grant shivered a helpless shiver for the last time, and at lunch logged on to begin his protest.

This particular use of the word random has penetrated pop-culture so recklessly and so thoroughly that examples can be found in English-speaking markets all across the globe.

They include:

→ Quote from American rom-com, He's Just Not That Into You: "I was delusional about that relationship. I used to refer to him as my husband to random people, like my dental hygienist."

→ Title of New York Magazine online article: "Six Random Michael Jackson Pop-Culture Moments."

→ Chorus line from British grime artist Lady Sovereign's single "Random": "Everybody get random/ Jus' do sumfin random."

→ Title of sketch-comedy series within Disney television show starring Demi Lovato, "Sonny With a Chance": "So random!"

→ Quote from Australian mockumentary television show, "Summer Heights High": "I'm not sitting next to some random emo!"

→ Quote from HBO's "True Blood," episode "Frenzy": "A maenad, in Bon Temps? That's random."

→ Name of candy in the shape of several discrete objects such as bowties, sunglasses, and paintbrushes, from British company Rowntree's: "Rowntree's randoms."

As an adjective, random is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as follows: "Having no definite aim or purpose; not sent or guided in a particular direction; made, done, occurring, etc., without method or conscious choice; haphazard." In other words, random is without pattern or objective; it's perfectly unbiased. To judge by the pop-culture usages cited above, however, the word has shifted away from its traditional usage, and now means:

a) Inconsequential
b) Rare, strange, curated
c) Exciting, absurd, capricious
d) Unexpected, arbitrary, silly
e) Outcast, distasteful, unknown
f) Unlikely, unfeasible, impossible
g) Incongruous fun

Mark Davies, a professor of Corpus Linguistics at Brigham Young University, has created a computer database called The Corpus of Historical American English. The CoHA system searches over "400 million words of text of American English from 1810 to 2009" to "see how words, phrases and grammatical constructions have increased or decreased in frequency, how words have changed meaning over time, and how stylistic changes have taken place in the language." It shows that random has grown in use each decade since the 1950s. Google's Ngram book usage search shows similar results.

In 2003, Ken Ringle declared in the Washington Post that we are living in an age of random. He wondered when young people became "so overwhelmed by the randomness of the stimuli assaulting them that they selected 'random' as their adjective of choice." He goes on:

Random is the flip side of that favorite slang term of post-World War II adolescent Americans: "neat." "Neat" was the achievement (or at least appearance) of order and symmetry in one's personal life equivalent to the butch haircuts, trimmed lawns and squared corners evanescent in 1950s public life. No loose ends left dangling. A well-tuned 1955 Chevrolet was "neat" in part because nothing about it had been left to chance.

It's not 2003 anymore, and the age of random may be waning in 2011, but we are still living in its wake. So, what happened? How did we go from a culture of neat to a culture of random? What created this sense of chaos reigning over order? Should we blame globalization, postmodernism, the internet, or, possibly, just "Family Guy"?

* * *

I met with now-former New York Times "On Language" magazine columnist Ben Zimmer one afternoon at a coffee shop in SoHo to discuss the contemporary onslaught of perceived randomness. He is the executive producer of two language-related websites, a consultant for the OED, a graduate of linguistics from Yale, a member of the American Dialect Society and the Dictionary Society of North America, and is not a nerd, but a gentleman.

Zimmer describes the word random as a defuser of social tension, a kind of "all-purpose label" for anything out of the norm. "It has an intonation to it, a sing-song quality, so it becomes almost a refrain," he said. "It's interjected as a kind of meta-commentary on whatever is happening in the situation."

Our conversation moved to etymology. When and where did random morph into these multiple new meanings?

Zimmer believes the change occurred among computer-science geeks from the late 1960s and early 1970s. In a column, "Creeper! Rando! Sketchball!." he located one of the first colloquial uses of random in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's student newspaper, The Tech, from 1971. Here, the word random as an adjective meant "Peculiar, strange; nonsensical, unpredictable, or inexplicable; unexpected," and as a noun meant "A person who happens to be in a particular place at a particular time, a person who is there by chance; a person who is not a member of a particular group; an outsider."

After publication, he received emails corroborating his belief in random's modern genesis. Michael Shull, a professor of Astrophysics at Colorado University, wrote that he remembers students using random in this fashion during his freshman year at Caltech in 1968. Shull said the word referred to "events that were out of the ordinary, obscure, even mysterious." Zimmer received another email from a student who attended Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York around the same time, confirming the same usage at his school.

"There obviously must have been a big influence from the more technical meanings of random and randomness coming out of probability theories, statistics, and computing," said Zimmer. "The triumph of kids at MIT and Caltech and geek culture in general might have helped spread it, but then if you think of someone like Alicia Silverstone in Clueless, she would seem completely isolated from those cultural currents. So how do you get from one to the other? It's hard to tell."

There is no doubt that this usage of random has spread—and it has spread for a reason. The word's meaning and function have merit; otherwise random wouldn't have bridged the gap between computer hackers and Valley Girls with such success. Like neat before it, random is a word young people find accurate in describing their world. Something about it is true.

Just look at those popular Old Spice commercials featuring that shirtless, towel-clad Old Spice Guy. In what appears to be his final video, he says the advertising campaign must end because he's too busy: "There's giant oaks that need chainsawing into yacht boats, Bermuda Triangle mysteries that need solving with huge magnifying glasses, and everyone knows I could use one or twelve medals for winning exotic car-drawing competitions." The clip ends with him catching a fish before exclaiming, "Silver fish hand catch."

Or consider "South Park"'s critique of "Family Guy" in season 10's two-part episode, "Cartoon Wars." In part II, Cartman visits Fox studios to discover that "Family Guy" is written by five manatees, which swim around in a large tank selecting idea balls labeled with either a verb, noun or pop-culture reference. The manatees push these idea balls into a slot, where they then fall haphazardly into a container that arranges them into a "Family Guy" joke.

At one point in history, these types of narratives might have been considered stream-of-consciousness, or perhaps free-association works of art belonging in the vein of Surrealism. Now they're just random.

"Certainly, young people are growing up in a world that accepts a kind of random clashing of ideas and concepts," said Zimmer. "Things like online culture certainly encourage the mixing of disparate elements that would normally not go together. You could pick two songs that are stylistically different as you can imagine and then create something new out of it. Even just the experience of browsing the web is an experience where there can be a tenuous relation from one stop to the next."

But are any of these pop-culture examples actually random in the dictionary definition of the word? I don't think so. Despite what the observer sees, hears, or experiences, there usually is a rational process behind the apparent randomness, a method to the madness.

Imagine a Brazilian woman with an eclectic taste. She likes to watch Anime and eat sushi, listen to Frank Sinatra but not Dean Martin, and wear authentic Jil Sander coats while sporting counterfeit Gucci handbags. Let's also say that she somehow hates every single Star Wars movie ever made—even the original three—and prefers everything Bollywood, instead.

Pretty random, right? Well, what if there is a reason behind each of her likes and dislikes? What is she spent an enjoyable year in Japan as a teenager? What if her father always danced to Sinatra in the living room, while her stepfather listens to Martin exclusively in his own bedroom? What if at some point she realized that Jar Jar Binks was no more irritating than C-3PO? If that's the case, then nothing about her preferences is really that random. Just because the mosaic of cultural artifacts may not make sense from the outset, it doesn't mean they lack order when her biography is revealed. No one lives outside of context. No one's actions are devoid of intentions.

The Facebook Group "NOT RANDOM" gives a list of things that aren't random: "That awesome outfit she's wearing"; "Her super cool new hair style"; "The party you went to last night"; "You."

* * *

Dr. Mads Haahr isn't surprised to hear that the modern usage of random originates from within the culture of computer programmers and data enthusiasts, partially because he belongs to this tribe. Haahr is a professor of Computer Science and Statistics at Trinity College in Dublin, and also the operator of random.org, a website that offers a True Random Number Generator (as opposed to a Pseudo-Random Number Generator) for your lottery-ticket or password-producing needs. Haahr is dedicated to understanding both the philosophical and technical meanings of randomness. I corresponded with him via email to better comprehend our relationship to this increasingly complicated notion of randomness.

As it turns out, Haahr believes people are nearly incapable of doing anything at random because our brains are too efficient at finding patterns, at seeking links between cause and effect. He claims that if you'd ask someone to write a list of 100 random numbers, the list would likely fail a statistical test for randomness. "Randomness," he wrote in an email, "is exactly the absence of patterns, and we have a hard time with this."

A link Haahr posted on his website argues that since we can't erase our memories of the past, we can never obtain the pure state of mental and emotional emptiness required to make a truly random decision. Our natural proclivities and personal histories prevent us from being without bias. "Thus," the link reads, "it is unlikely we can meet Oprah Winfrey's and other's admonition to perform 'random acts of kindness.' We will have to settle for just 'being kind.'"

Haahr wrote to me about the process of getting dressed in the morning:

I suspect someone who gets up and puts on random clothes in the morning just means that they don't put a lot of thought into it. Of course this doesn't mean that it is random in any formal sense, just that they are not conscious of the selection process. Certainly a selection process still takes place unconsciously.... I think our minds are working overtime to make sense of an environment that our improved knowledge has revealed to be more complex than we'd ever imagined.

In a sense, when a teenager deems a person or idea "So random!", they are being dismissive of that person or idea. The teen who utters this word after being confronted with something unfamiliar—an event that doesn't resonate with his understanding of the universe—is in a way regaining control by restoring order. What is random is folly, and therefore not a threat. In other words, it's comforting to consider our beliefs and perspectives as logical—they make sense, after all—while any beliefs or perspectives outside of, or in opposition to our own, must therefore be chaotic, confusing, random.

"It is a way of forestalling thinking about deeper connections that might be happening," said Zimmer. "It can be a superficial reaction to things that break the norms that you're used to. By people using it so much you get the sense that they are encountering things they didn't expect quite a lot, and that's the only way they know how to react to it."

What is dangerous about this verbal tic, this bad habit, is that it perpetuates a worldview of large-scale disorganization. Since thoughts and language are so intrinsically connected, some kind of fundamental shift is taking place in our minds through the continual maligned use of the word. I'm thinking here in terms of George Orwell's 1984, where Newspeak leads to doublethink, or Nicholas Carr's article "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" from The Atlantic, where Carr argues that the Internet not only alters what we think about, but how we think about what we think about. If words are the building blocks of thought, wouldn't an abundance of random blocks result in a tendency to build random buildings?

I corresponded with Dr. Paul Horwich, a philosophy professor at NYU who specializes in Wittgenstein's theory of language. He agrees that someone with an impoverished vocabulary will have an impoverished potential for thought, but that overall the modern usage of random isn't that harmful.

"I don't think you can infer from the fact that kids now use the word random a lot more than they used to, that they OVER use it," Horwich wrote in an email. "Nor can you infer that their vocabulary is impoverished. The increased frequency in the word's use might be due to an increased interest in randomness, and a sensitivity to it."

So maybe things aren't so bad. Words change in usage throughout time; that's okay. In the Medieval period, before random meant "without pattern or purpose," the word denoted something done "at a great speed." Furthermore, Zimmer informed me that the entry for 'random' will be updated to include some contemporary definitions in the next edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. These days the anti-random Facebook Groups aren't receiving as many wall posts as they used to.

* * *

When Ringle opened his Washington Post article with the line, "We have seen the future and it is random," I believe he was making a moral point. The post-World War II "neat" may have been an ignorant oversimplification of the world and its inherent messiness, but the post-9/11 random is an exaggeration of this messiness and an unwillingness to find resolve or connection. There is something unthinking and uncurious and unfeeling in its use. It is defensive. It indicates a lack of empathy.

Random is anathema to synthesis through imagination, a refusal to enter the unknown.

Pascal wrote, "The heart has reasons of which reason knows nothing." People cannot be purely rational automatons operating on a cold, dead planet. Fortuitous things happen. We give way to whim and fancy. Love exists. You can side with the reasons of the heart, or with an uncaring, indifferent randomness.

Paul Hiebert is a writer in New York.

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