There are few modern experiences more destabilising than innocently using a phrase you have understood perfectly well your entire life, only to discover the internet has quietly been doing something unspeakable to it for the past fifteen years.
Recently, while writing about goodbye hugs, I described Nathan and I coordinating our height difference:
“like docking spacecraft.”
To my immediate horror, I realised that a phrase which is, on the face of it, both elegant and efficient — even faintly cinematic — had apparently been hijacked and assigned an entirely different operational meaning sometime around 2009.
(Do not Google this if the term means nothing to you. Or at the very least, open a private browser tab.)
In fact, I should probably stop Google indexing this page entirely. I suspect the search traffic associated with “docking Nathan” would attract a demographic I am profoundly unequipped to serve.
Despite being profoundly eager to serve them.
This increasingly appears to be the central tragedy of online adulthood.
At some point the internet quietly steals ordinary language and returns it carrying entirely new and deeply troubling secondary meanings.
Suddenly completely innocent phrases begin triggering microscopic moments of hesitation in otherwise respectable adults.
“Raw dogging.”
“Edging.”
“Thirst trap.”
“Daddy.”
A quick furtive glance around the table will usually tell you who is using the phrase as God intended, and who has been irreversibly corrupted.
Ironically, at our table it is almost always Nathan and I quietly imploding.
Entire generations now move cautiously through everyday conversation like linguistic bomb disposal technicians.
Which perhaps explains why modern life increasingly feels like everybody is operating from slightly different versions of the same dictionary.
Some people still hear words in their original innocent form.
Others hear:
- memes,
- pornography,
- niche internet lore,
- TikTok audio,
- Reddit threads,
- or catastrophic group chats from 2017.
The internet has not merely accelerated language drift.
It has shattered linguistic innocence entirely.
Words no longer arrive cleanly.
They arrive trailing associations, references, screenshots, euphemisms, and half-remembered jokes accumulated from millions of strangers sharing the same poisoned digital ecosystem.
And once a phrase acquires one of these secondary meanings, it can never fully return to civilian use.
Somewhere right now there is undoubtedly another perfectly harmless technical term quietly evolving toward catastrophe inside a server on the interwebs, and eventually one of us will say it out loud during a dinner party before immediately understanding, from the expressions around the table, that civilisation has once again moved on without us.
[EDIT] As I write this, Joy is watching a Facebook video in the background where somebody has just announced:
“I can’t wait to pull off my first lemon.”
Civilisation may already be beyond saving.
Anyway.
I have deleted “docking spacecraft” from the original essay.
Probably wise.
— g