Our species is more alone than we've ever been even though our numbers are greater than they've ever been and our means for reaching each other is nearly limitless.

Because everyone is so, so deeply scared of social rejection, an instinct bred into us through ice ages and apocalypses where we needed each other to survive, that the fear of rejections has become one of our primary social motivators. People now have a choice of trying to find social circles and groups that they can adapt to or compromise with like we've struggled through for thousands of years, or withdraw into spaces that prevent us from ever having to experience even a chance of rejection. Feel awkward when a stranger says hello? You can choose to practice getting better at responding to others, experience failures as well as successes, or you can retreat to a place where "hello" means oppression and you don't ever need to ever risk pain by responding.

This is just a tiny, micro-slice of the issue but EVERYONE does this, and if you think you don't, you are also stuck in the film-strip post-hoc rationalizing your every feeling.

Verbing weirds language.

"Edit" and "access" also weren't originally verbs. Same with "babysit" and "eavesdrop". Backformation and category changing are common and perfectly natural processes in English.

Edit: This isn't directed at the OP of this comment chain, but I'm always surprised by the crazy amount of ignorant prescriptivism I see all over Lemmy. Like, I expected that shit on Reddit, but I thought we were better than that here, especially since literally the only real reason for prescriptivism is sowing class division and excluding people for not having access to the secret knowledge of "correct" (yuck!) grammar.

Keep complaining and it's going to be a noun next

Since someone used it as a verb and it was understood by their audience

'vagueing abt me being ableist'

'implying i was ableist'

There, translated.

Oh look, proper english is more direct and succinct!

Guess the tumblr user likes vagueing as well.

"Vagueing" as in "vagueposting".

Since we've all had to rework any word referencing Twitter for obvious reasons, I suppose.

"Posting" is fine, all the dumb "toots" and "skeets" are not. If you're trying to salvage "vaguetweeting" I suppose that is a semi-reasonable outcome. I don't think it works quite as well for subtweeting, though.

As far as zoomer/alpha slang goes, this makes a HELL of a lot more sense than most of the shit they've turned into verbs and the vast lexicon of terms they have for people who disappoint them.

I agree, this needed more layers.

Its wild to watch society at large do this more and more often, from the outside, as a non corpo, algorithm driven social media user.

People are unlearning, or just never learning, how to be accountable, how to communcate precisely, at a linguistic level... and hyperbole just keeps getting presented as literality.

The only thing I can compare it to is 1984's newspeak, but that is all top down, mandated, enforced... and this is ... organic, but amplified by our communication methods being maximized for drama.

The average person increasingly just has no actual linguistic/mental ability to convey a precise thought.

Its even impacting the art we make.

Idiot plots.

Idiot plots everywhere, more and more entire shows either heavily involve or entirely revolve around characters continuously making increasingly emotionally elevated judgements against other characters, which all could have been solved or avoided if one or two or three of them just said a few things that were more precise and less vague at key plot beats.

Maybe we need a name for a trope that is a subtype of the idiot plot, for a plot that only happens because everyone is emotionally bipolar/hypercharged, and also is incapable of directly and accurately asking a question, answering a question, making a statement, incapable of not using loaded questions, vague answers, and 'Schrödinger's Irony' style statements, where its just a joke if immediate reception is negative, but totally serious if reception is positive.

i find it helps me to view other people explicitly as separate entities with free will.

Makes it harder to do any sort of funny business when you're more aware of their autonomy on a fundamental level.

but I am your father

this just terminally online brain rot