In 2024, Seattle’s Museum of Pop Culture found itself in hot water for a placard it displayed about the “27 Club” – a group of famous artists who died at the age of 27. The placard begins, “Kurt Cobain un-alived himself at 27, placing him in the company of other artists who passed at that same age under tragic circumstances, such as Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jean-Michel Basquiat.”
As any grunge fan knows, while Nirvana was at its cultural pinnacle in 1994, frontman Kurt Cobain was battling severe depression and agonizing, undiagnosed stomach pain, both of which drove him to self-medicate with heroin.
On March 4 of that year, Cobain was hospitalized in Rome following an overdose of drugs and alcohol. His wife, Courtney Love, later said of the incident: “He took 50 pills. He probably forgot how many he took. But there was a definite suicidal urge, to be gobbling and gobbling and gobbling.” The hospital released him, and he returned to Seattle, Washington, with Love.
Over the next month, Cobain’s downward spiral continued. Once back in Seattle, Love staged an intervention for Cobain, who lashed out at the people involved and locked himself upstairs in his room. By the end of the day, though, he agreed to check into a facility and began a detox program on March 30 in Los Angeles.
On April 1, he escaped the facility and flew back to Seattle.
On April 2, he bought shotgun shells.
On April 5, he penned a note to his childhood imaginary friend – Boddah – in which Cobain wrote: “I havent felt the excitement of listening to as well as creating music along with reading and writing for too many years now…I have it good, very good, and Im grateful, but since the age of seven, Ive become hateful towards all humans in general…I dont have the passion anymore and so remember, its better to burn out than to fade away.” Cobain then pulled the trigger of his Remington Model 11 20-gauge shotgun.
There is, of course, more to Cobain’s suicide than what’s been described above. It is difficult, if not impossible, to describe the full weight of anyone’s suicide – Ernest Hemingway’s, Anthony Bourdain’s, Kurt Cobain’s, Robin Williams’ – in a single page. Even the word “suicide” hardly seems to do the deaths justice. But words like “suicide,” “shot himself,” and “hung himself,” while taboo, evoke certain images and bring with them a dark, uneasy feeling.
That feeling isn’t as present in the word used by Seattle’s Museum of Pop Culture, “un-alive.”
If you’re on TikTok, you know the term well: It’s one of the many modifications to the English language that originated on social media, where “un-alive” has replaced “suicide” and “kill”; two adults enjoying each other’s company have “seggs”; “eating disorder,” “sexual assault,” and “self-harm” are reduced to pairs of letters, “ED,” “SA,” and “SH”; and “rape” is “grape.”
All of the above are examples of algospeak.
These terms originated as creators sought to avoid terms that they believed – or in some cases, knew – social platforms were censoring.
There are plenty of reasons why a social media company might censor certain words online – namely, to protect ad revenue and comply with laws.
Tech companies argue that the blanket censorship of words like “suicide” and “sex” is because algorithmic censors fail to pick up on the necessary context that distinguishes the “weed” that competes with the vegetables in your garden, for example, from the “weed” I kept by my desk in college.
Social media users argue that tech companies deliberately censor certain words, accounts, or topics to avoid controversy or further certain narratives. Either way, both roads lead to algospeak: A form of self-censorship used to talk about topics online without drawing the ire of the algorithm.
This type of self-censorship works because the people who discuss controversial or sensitive topics online often make money from the platform. We at Roca, for example, will censor words like “drugs” or “sex” with our wave logo before posting them on our Instagram, where we have our largest following. We have to comply with YouTube’s standards when posting videos or risk them getting demonetized. In both cases, adhering to the platforms’ guidelines is the trade-off we pay for being able to post.
You may be wondering what the issue is. If we consent to the terms of service for the platforms, and there are ways around censorship so we can still get our point across, why does it matter?
Because online self-censorship is bleeding into real life.
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Now, back to the article.
Comedian George Carlin famously claimed that euphemisms conceal reality. He gave the example of “shell shock”:
There’s a condition in combat. Most people know about it. It’s when a fighting person’s nervous system has been stressed to its absolute peak and maximum, can’t take any more input. The nervous system has either snapped or is about to snap. In the first world war, that condition was called shellshock. Simple, honest, direct language. Two syllables: shell-shock. Almost sounds like the guns themselves. That was 72 ago.
Then a whole generation went by and the second world war came along, and the very same combat condition was called battle fatigue. Four syllables now. Takes a little longer to say. Doesn’t seem to hurt as much. Fatigue is a nicer word than shock. Shellshock! Battle fatigue.
Carlin then jumps to the Korean War:
…1950. Madison Avenue was riding high by that time, and the very same combat condition was called operational exhaustion. Hey, we’re up to eight syllables now! And the humanity has been squeezed completely out of the phrase. It’s totally sterile now. Operational exhaustion. Sounds like something that might happen to your car.
Lastly, he skips to…
…the war in Vietnam, which has only been over for about sixteen or seventeen years, and thanks to the lies and deceits surrounding that war, I guess it’s no surprise that the very same condition was called post-traumatic stress disorder. Still eight syllables, but we’ve added a hyphen! And the pain is completely buried under jargon. Post-traumatic stress disorder. I’ll bet you if we’d have still been calling it shellshock, some of those Vietnam veterans might have gotten the attention they needed at the time. I’ll betcha that. I’ll betcha that.
It’s true that “post-traumatic stress disorder” (now reduced to just four letters, PTSD) may be a more accurate term. After all, “shell shock” was originally believed to be the result of artillery shockwaves rattling the brain, and PTSD applies not just to people who have experienced war, but to those who have experienced any type of severe trauma.
But there is clearly a truth in Carlin’s joke that can be seen in the adoption of algo-speak: To speak in censor-friendly language is to deprive words of their purest, most impactful meaning. Simply put: Are we not limiting the value of our language by saying that someone “un-alived” someone else, rather than saying that they killed them?
Of course, people have modified language about touchy subjects long before social media. In polite company, we more often hear of someone “passing away” than “dying.” People often describe the crime as “sexual assault” to avoid using the more visceral and frightening “rape.” There are often good reasons to do so.
Yet algorithms are accelerating the rate at which languages change. Words like “skibidi,” “rizz,” “delulu,” and “tradwife” now emerge and appear in our dictionaries within a year, while algorithms compel us to substitute powerful words for less impactful ones. No more does a book need to be burned at the Opernplatz to take its language out of use.
Perhaps I’m being dramatic, but, knowing the full story, it kills me to hear Kurt Cobain’s suicide described as an “un-aliving.”
Editor’s Note
We want to hear from you: Do you think the algospeak trends are a good thing or a bad thing? Why? Let us know here or in the comments below.
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Enjoy the rest of your Sunday. We’ll see you tomorrow.
—Max and Max
Acronyms and doublespeak impoverish communication and infantilise the writing and speech- that’s what I feel
George Carlin was way ahead of his time. Period. The Tik Tok speak is continued dumbing down of our culture.