1068. Did Yosemite Sam ever actually say "tarnation"? What’s "fridgescaping," and why is it trending? And why is AI filling the internet with nonsense words like “lrtsjerk”? Linguist and translator Heddwen Newton shares her favorite new slang, explains the Mandela Effect, and breaks down how AI-generated content is making language even messier.
1068. Did Yosemite Sam ever actually say "tarnation"? What’s "fridgescaping," and why is it trending? And why is AI filling the internet with nonsense words like “lrtsjerk”? Linguist and translator Heddwen Newton shares her favorite new slang, explains the Mandela Effect, and breaks down how AI-generated content is making language even messier.
Find Heddwen Newton at her newsletter, English in Progress.
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MIGNON: Grammar Girl here. I'm Mignon Fogarty, and today I'm here with Heddwen Newton, who is an English teacher and translator in Germany, who was raised in a bilingual Dutch-English household and is fascinated by contemporary English and the way English changes. She also runs a Dutch website that helps Dutch people find English translations for difficult-to-translate words.
But she's on the show today because I absolutely love her email newsletter called English in Progress, which comes out every couple of months or so and is filled with fascinating words—mostly new words and slang. Heddwen, welcome to the Grammar Girl podcast.
HEDDWEN: Thank you. It's so nice to be here.
MIGNON: Yeah. So you have your finger on the pulse of language change.
And my first question is, where do you generally find all this Gen Z and Gen Alpha slang that you include in your newsletter?
HEDDWEN: Yeah. So it's a great question. And the answer is definitely not from my own lived experience because, as people can probably see and as people can probably hear, I have the wrong accent and the wrong age to be busy with slang at all. It's just my fascination. But I like making people cringe by saying things like, “I was yapping with my bestie about new slang being so slay.”
I am not the right person for this. I do not…I get it from what I see and hear around me. So I really get it from other people. I have a 17-year-old nephew who is gold. He lives online, and he's really fascinated with language. So every time he hears about a new interesting word, he will WhatsApp it to me, and send it to me, and let me know.
And I have Google Alerts set up for anything you can think of that might have to do with slang. So every time anybody writes a list with “The 10 slangy words that your teenagers say, but you don't understand them. Here they are explained,” So I basically read every single one of those articles. They usually just regurgitate the same words again and again, but every now and then, there'll be a new one there. Yeah, and there's just other people who keep a much better eye on slang than I do. Like John Kelly, who runs the new Merriam-Webster slang page, which is great. It's brand new, and I advise everybody to go take a look. And Kelly Wright, who does the Words of the Year for the American Dialect Society.
Yeah, those are my sources.
MIGNON: Wonderful. Yeah. I love it.
HEDDWEN: Steal other people's work.
MIGNON: That 17-year-old sounds very valuable. And I welcome all our young listeners to cringe and feel free to mock us because we're going to talk about, “Ooh, this slang word. Ooh, that slang word,” and I know it's cringey.
HEDDWEN: Exactly like that.
MIGNON: But I was going through some of your older newsletters, the more recent but older newsletters, to look for some especially fun words to talk about.
And this one actually is Victorian slang. This is one of my favorites. So it's not all just Gen Z. "Podsnappery." I love this "podsnappery," which is actually Victorian slang meaning the belief that everything you do is right and everything everyone else does is wrong. And obviously we need to bring this back because it's so useful.
But can you talk about where that comes from?
HEDDWEN: Yeah, so it's an etymon, which means it comes from a name, and the name is John Podsnap, who was a character in "Our Mutual Friend" by Charles Dickens. And this character did that, right? So he thought that he was always right and everybody else was always wrong. And I love this because it just goes to show that what young people do is they take their slang or their ideas for slang from what is cool at that moment, and nowadays, that's like hip hop videos or edgy internet forums. But it used to be Charles Dickens, right? He was cool and hip and edgy in his day.
I'm also an English teacher, as you said in the intro, so this kind of stuff always also just gets my heart beating faster.
MIGNON: Dickens.
HEDDWEN: Yes, exactly.
MIGNON: So this "podsnappery," it's in the Oxford English Dictionary now. So some slang fades away—lots of slang fades away—but some of it makes it into the everlasting reference books. So what are some of your favorite words that you've encountered recently?
HEDDWEN: Yes, I really like the ones with a sense of humor. When a young—I keep saying young person, but let's keep doing that. I don't know. When a young person wants to say, “I'm not lying about this. I'm telling the truth,” mostly nowadays they say "no cap." That tends to be the standard now. But another way of saying it is "fax, no printer.”
MIGNON: No printer.
HEDDWEN: So it's a joke on the word facts as in that is true, but fax as in the machine that these guys only know from films and television anymore. They haven't actually used one ever in their life, which makes me slightly depressed. But yeah, so they think it's hilarious to say, “I'm telling you the truth. Fax, no printer."
MIGNON: Oh, that's hilarious. That's if we had said, “telegraph, no phone.” Then that doesn't play on the word facts.
HEDDWEN: That's how long ago it was. Yeah, exactly.
MIGNON: My gosh, every once in a while I have to use a digital fax, and I'm still just like, who does this?
HEDDWEN: It's crazy; my doctor still uses them. And I'm like, what? What are you doing? Yeah.
MIGNON: Yeah. It's a security thing, I think, but it's just so outdated. Okay. So what are some more?
HEDDWEN: So I also really like main character energy. Say, “Oh, that person, she has main character energy,” meaning she's like the main character in her own film. She's really rocking it.
MIGNON: Yeah, that's one of the lines with—we recently talked about the word "lore." And it was one of the words of the year. John Kelly was a guest on the show and how people, literature, characters in literature have lore, and now people are starting to talk about their own lore. So that's another way of thinking about yourself as a character in a story.
That's so interesting.
HEDDWEN: Yeah, so the internet tells me that people also say it about themselves. That seems a bit weird to me. Would you say about yourself that you have main character energy? “I have main character energy?” I would never say that about myself.
MIGNON: Yeah, but then it falls in with—I don't know. It makes me think of, there's so much of posting pictures of ourselves. “I feel cute, might delete later.” It's not the same thing, but we do project an image of ourselves as a character sometimes on social media.
So I can see how that filters into how people talk about themselves.
HEDDWEN: Yeah, I suppose so. And the other one, which might come back later, is actually from LGBTQ culture, from drag performances, which is “she ate and left no crumbs.” So…
MIGNON: What?
HEDDWEN: …she did something really well. “Oh yeah, she ate and left no crumbs.” And that is now so popular that it has been shortened to “she ate” or “she ate that,” which means, “Oh, you did that really well.” That's actually one that's so popular now that I've even heard it in the wild. So it's really going into the, just the normal regular lexicon.
MIGNON: Cool. No, I haven't heard that one yet. That's interesting. "Ate." "Ate."
And then I saw one in your newsletter; it was “4 plus 4" means "good,” which I was like, where does that come from?
HEDDWEN: And that's exactly it, because four plus four equals eight. Therefore, she ate that. Four plus four.
MIGNON: Amazing how it's transformed so much. It reminds me of Cockney rhyming slang in a way.
HEDDWEN: It is a little bit similar, isn't it? Yeah, the way it takes two steps away from what it actually wants to say, what it wants to say. Yeah.
MIGNON: So do you know how to use "4 plus 4"? Is that something like you text back when someone does something good?
HEDDWEN: Yeah, I would say that's exactly it. Yeah.
MIGNON: Okay, cool.
HEDDWEN: Don’t ask me these questions. I only know…
MIGNON: Cool. Yeah.
HEDDWEN: …the words and the definitions.
And then I have to— I like getting things right. I like getting them right in my newsletter. So what I also very often do is I go on Reddit, and I actually ask people, “How do you use this? How do you actually put it in a sentence?”
MIGNON: Yeah.
HEDDWEN: Which is fun with the word “skibbidy” because nobody knows what it means. And nobody knows how to put it in a sentence. And I just asked just the other day, and I didn't really get particularly good replies. It seems to be very ambiguous and very strange.
MIGNON: But you said one of your kids uses it all the time.
HEDDWEN: No, one of my kids used it once.
MIGNON: Oh.
HEDDWEN: Once in her life, and it shocked me to my core, but then she never did it again. And I keep waiting. Is she going to do it again? But no.
MIGNON: I expected that one to fall out of favor. I'm surprised that one has stuck around for as long as it has.
HEDDWEN: Yeah.
MIGNON: Yeah. So what more? What else?
HEDDWEN: Oh yeah, and I have— because I also, in my newsletter, I don't only do slang; I also do neologisms, so new words that have not been brought into society by young people, per se, but maybe by scientists. And I really like the little word “anthrobot,” which is a little teeny tiny robot made out of human cells. And I'm not sure if they've got it to work really well yet, but the idea is that the human body won't reject it.
So you can send these little robots up into your body to fix things—fixing neural things in your brain, I think, is the idea.
MIGNON: Oh, wow.
HEDDWEN: But what I like about it is it's such a nice word because that “anthro,” of course, means "human" in ancient Greek, which you can see in a word like “anthropology,” which is the study of humans.
So “anthrobot,” and I just think whichever scientist who probably usually does biochemistry or whatever, I think he or she did a really good job to think of that.
MIGNON: Yeah. It's an elegant word. Elegant word. Yeah. So one of the things I thought was interesting that you pointed out in your newsletter is the word “nosh.” I thought it was interesting that it had a different meaning, slightly different meaning, in British English and American English.
HEDDWEN: Yeah, so I am going to be very interested in what you tell me because these are the things that I find. And as you can hear, I am British. For me, what “nosh” means is—I think about 50 years ago people would have used it as a normal word; nowadays it's more of a joke word because it's old-fashioned. But if somebody said, “Hey, shall we have some nosh?” I would take that as dinner, like that would be a warm meal on a plate. What does it mean to you, is it mean the same?
MIGNON: I think I would use it more to mean a snack, in a “They gave me a cheese board, cheese and crackers or something like that.”
HEDDWEN: Yeah, that would never be “nosh” to me. No, it has to be something preferably mashed potatoes with sausages or something like that. That would be “nosh.” Yeah.
MIGNON: You're making me hungry. So another interesting entry you had was about “tarnation,” which you said is American for "eternal damnation." But most Americans don't actually know that. And I can confirm that I am American, and I did not know that. So tell me more about that word.
HEDDWEN: Yeah, so what's great about that word is not the word in itself, but the fact that people think that the Looney Tunes character Yosemite Sam said this all the time. So I think he's the one with the big cowboy hat and the red beard.
MIGNON: I would say that he's Yosemite Sam.
HEDDWEN: Oh, there we go. See, American English. It is something I don't speak. "Yosemite.'
MIGNON: Yosemite is a national park in the country. Yeah. Oh, that's adorable.
HEDDWEN: I think I have been saying “Yosemite” for a long time.
MIGNON: That is great. I love that. Okay. I love that so much. Okay, so everyone thinks Yosemite Sam said that. But he didn't?
HEDDWEN: He didn't say it very often. So I think a certain language scientist actually went in and watched all the cartoons and found it like twice, but not at all like you'd expect it to be, like at least once every episode, and he hardly ever said it. And this is called the Mandela Effect.
So it's when lots of people in the world think that something cultural was a certain way, but actually it's not, and we just all made it up. And the other famous example is that the Berenstain Bears—now am I pronouncing that right?
MIGNON: I'm not sure, actually. I am not culturally literate enough to know about the right bears.
HEDDWEN: So the Berenstain Bears, which were never very popular in the UK, but I gather they were popular in America. My children have a few of their books. And it's actually spelled “Berenstain Bears” with an "-ai," but everybody, if you ask them to write it down, they will write it with an "-ei," and then when they see that it's actually with an "-ai," they're like, “No, that's not right. That's not what it was.” But it was, and it's the Mandela Effect. And the other nice example, I think, is—I can ask you, the Monopoly man. So the elderly gentleman with the top hat on the Monopoly game—
MIGNON: Yeah?
HEDDWEN: Does he have—how can I say this—glasses or an eyepiece?
MIGNON: Oh, I think he has a monocle.
HEDDWEN: Yeah, so he actually doesn't. If you look at the—everybody thinks he has a monocle, and when people dress up as him, they put a monocle on, but actually, if you look at Monopoly the game, he doesn't.
He just has two eyes. He's not even wearing glasses.
MIGNON: Wild. The Mandela Effect I'm aware of is about the word “dilemma.” So lots of people, including me, think they were taught in school to spell “dilemma” with an N—so D-I-L-E-M-N-A—but it's spelled with two M's, and nobody's ever been able to find proof that any school book or cartoon or anything ever, anywhere, ever taught it with an N.
But lots and lots of people think they were taught to spell it with an N. I've talked to people from my high school, and they also think they were taught to spell it with an N. We all do, but there's just literally no proof anywhere that this ever happened.
HEDDWEN: That is so fascinating. I'd never heard that one before.
MIGNON: Yeah, it's wild. So “tarnation” is one of those. Yosemite Sam never said it. And actually, I have to say, I feel bad now—like I corrected your pronunciation, and I always say that's rude, but I was just so delighted. I was so thrilled and delighted to hear the cute way you were saying it. I didn't mean it in a bad way to correct you.
HEDDWEN: No, please do. And do you know what? So maybe this is my—I'm not sure if this is my own little Mandela Effect, but I have heard the word “Yosemite,” of course, in films and series, and I have read the word for me, "Yosemite," and it never clicked with me that it was the same place. So you just blew my mind.
MIGNON: There's another name for those; I think they are called “misles.”
HEDDWEN: Ooh.
MIGNON: It comes from people; it's when people read a word and learn it that way and don't recognize the pronunciation with the spelling. So it comes from the word "misled." So people think that the word "misled"—it's "misled," M-I-S-L-E-D, yeah. People think the word "misled" is "my-zel-d" because they've only read it, and they've never heard it pronounced out loud in conjunction with reading it, and so they think it's "my-zel-d" instead. And there's a whole class of words that people mispronounce that way because they've only read them.
It's so interesting.
HEDDWEN: It just goes to show it's people who read a lot, right?
MIGNON: Yeah, exactly.
HEDDWEN: People who read books as kids as well. I was telling my son one of my favorite books when I was little was "The Magician's Nephew" by C. S. Lewis. It's the first book in the Narnia series, and I remember reading that and thinking it was "Magic Ian." And I read the book thinking that this word was "Magic Ian"—"The Magic Ian's Nephew."
MIGNON: So did you think Ian was a name? Like the magic Ian?
HEDDWEN: It didn't click with me. No, I thought, no, a Magic Ian is somebody who does magic. I was only eight, probably.
MIGNON: Yeah.
HEDDWEN: Yeah. And then I think probably two years later, I heard "magician" pronounced, and I was reading it, and I was like, "Ohhh."
MIGNON: Yeah, that's a misle. But then also, actually, it reminds me of a mondegreen too. So there, yeah, there's a famous poem where someone talks about, and I forget what it's about, but the line is "and laid him on the green." It's about someone who died, and the woman is a child who I think eventually became a famous writer, interpreted it as "Lady Mondegreen."
And so she imagined this dramatic lady dying. And that's where we get another word for these kinds of mishearings or misunderstandings. Yeah, such fun. So much fun with words. So much fun. Another one of my favorite words from your newsletter was "personality hire." I thought this was fun.
Someone who is hired just because people like them and not so much for their skills? I don't know how often this happens.
HEDDWEN: I heard this one, and I immediately started thinking of a few people in my office where I thought, "Ooh, they might be personality hires." Because I think it does make sense, right? You do want a few people in the office who create a good atmosphere. If everybody's just grumbling to each other, it's no good, and nobody gets any work done.
So yeah, "personality hire" is one of those new HR words, and HR—human resources—is one of those areas that gives the world a lot of new words.
MIGNON: Yeah.
HEDDWEN: And some of them stick, and some of them don't, but yeah. HR is very productive.
MIGNON: When I still remember, and we used jokingly from probably 20 or 30 years ago now, and from consulting agencies, they talked about "counseling someone out" as firing them. They were "counseled out." We still use that in my family. "Oh, do you want to get counseled out?"
HEDDWEN: And, but then what would that mean exactly? That you have deep conversations with somebody and tell them to leave, or...?
MIGNON: I think it just means you're fired. They were counseled out. Maybe you had a meeting about it if you were lucky.
HEDDWEN: Yeah, oh goodness, okay.
MIGNON: Yeah, I'm trying to decide if "personality hire" is meant positively or negatively when it's used in the world, because I could see that being used as a euphemism for someone who doesn't have any skills or is bad at their job.
HEDDWEN: Yeah. That’s a really good point. So when I came across it, it was a positive word. I think I came across it in an article by HR people saying, "This is maybe something you should do. You should get a personality hire." But yeah, if I'm in the office, and Fred from next door, he sent a stupid email again, and I say to my colleague, "Oh yeah, he's just the personality hire."
MIGNON: Yeah, I can imagine it, totally imagine it being used that way. Another one—this one, heaven help us—because this, I will never do this, but "fridgescaping"? What is fridgescaping?
HEDDWEN: Oh, that one made me go, "Oh dear, I hope nobody ever looks at my fridge." Yeah, so it's from "landscaping." Now apparently, I didn't even know this, but landscaping had already been used to also make the word "tablescaping," which is to make your table really nice for Christmas dinner, maybe, to make it look lovely, which I can understand. That's something that I actually do.
But then "fridgescaping" is apparently to make your fridge look really nice and to make sure that everything in there is color-coordinated and put from large to small in some kind of aesthetically pleasing way. And yes, I don't want anything to do with it.
MIGNON: No, no. I guess I imagine it must come from Instagram influencers—people who are doing cooking videos. I hope those are the only people spending effort on that.
HEDDWEN: I think I have seen that there are indeed fridgescaping influencers who will show you their fridge and say, "Look at these special plastic boxes that I have that make the colors of the strawberries inside look just so." And, oh God.
MIGNON: I'm glad that hasn't made it into my algorithm.
HEDDWEN: Yeah. Not my cup of tea, definitely.
MIGNON: Another one that I just loved was "plogging." This is picking up trash and recycling while you are jogging. And it was—you said it was the Swedish word "plåka," which means "to pick." And tell us more about plogging.
HEDDWEN: Yeah, apparently it's a lawyer in Chile who does it with his dog, and I'm not sure how come we know about him. I very much assume he's been filming himself and putting himself on YouTube. I'm not actually sure about that. But yeah, plogging—so picking up litter while jogging. I think that's great.
MIGNON: Yeah.
HEDDWEN: This is much better than fridgescaping. Let's all do plogging. Come on.
MIGNON: Yeah, let's spend our effort picking up recycling and trash instead of making the inside of our refrigerators look better. One thing I loved about the article about the plogger is he tracked not only the miles that he was running but the amount of trash he picked up. So we're all so much about tracking everything we do now—our steps and our miles and everything.
I thought, that's a good thing to track—the amount of garbage you pick up and making the world a better place. A cleaner place.
HEDDWEN: Yeah, it's really cool.
MIGNON: He even trained his dog to bring him cans and bottles. He trained his dog to bring him recyclables that were lying on the ground.
HEDDWEN: I knew there was something with the dog. Thank you, Mignon, for remembering what it was with the dog. Yes. Yeah, it's brilliant.
MIGNON: And then to finish up the main segment, you wrote a piece about AI ghost words that I thought was really fascinating. Can you talk about how you discovered AI ghost words and what they are?
HEDDWEN: Yeah. So as I said at the top, I work with Google Alerts to help to alert me to new words and new slang. So I have a Google Alert set up for the word "neologism." So if anybody writes an article and posts it online, and it has the word "neologism" in it, then Google will send me an email to alert me. And for a while there, probably mid-last year, I was suddenly getting a ton of fake articles about fake words, and the one that really stood out to me was "lrtsjerk," and the reason I'm pronouncing it like that is because it's an unpronounceable word.
So the beginning of it is just a string of consonants, so it's L R T S J; you can't say. So I was quite clear that this is not a real word. But then I found one article that said this is a new kind of fitness regime and another article that said this is a new kind of linguistic phenomenon. And, oh, I think seven more articles with seven different meanings for this word. And I thought, “What is going on?” And then when I took a better look at it, what I realized was that all of these articles had been written by AI. Now I read a lot of stuff written by AI, and after a while, you start recognizing it.
HEDDWEN: Mignon, you know way more about this than I do because I just love your newsletter, A.I. SideQuest, which taught me so much. So you can't recognize it with AI checkers, which as an English teacher hurts my heart, but unfortunately, there's no way to put it into software and have the software tell you this was written by AI or this was written by a human. The only thing I can say is that AI texts are a bit too frilly, and they're a bit too much about nothing, I would say. And they've got lots and lots of headings in between the paragraphs. It's just so much fluff. I'm not sure if a human being could ever manage to write so much fluff. And I mean, we're calling it slop nowadays, right?
Which I think really hits the right mark. So yeah, what is happening is that people are just pumping out articles for the internet. I imagine they're doing this for ad revenue. I'm not actually 100 percent sure if that's true, but they're just taking anything that people are searching on Google and just saying, “Okay, apparently people are searching this, so let's just pump out articles. Let's just have AI write a hundred articles about this.”
And my theory about these words, because it wasn't just “lrtsjerk,” but there were quite a few words like this where it just wasn't a word, but there was still an article about what this thing was, is that these are typos that people are making when they are searching online, and they're just maybe mashing their keyboard and pressing enter. And these lists of things that people have been searching online are maybe being sold, and people are just writing; people are having AI write articles about them. And at the time, I thought, “Oh dear, this is dangerous,” because if a young person with maybe not such a big lexicon yet reads this, then they're going to believe it because it comes across as completely true.
However, this article that you saw of mine, it's about a year old now, I think, Google is doing a good job. I don't know what they do, but I have noticed that Google is incredibly good at filtering between human-written stuff and AI-written stuff, and that these articles, which are just complete gunk, Google Alerts, for example, isn't sending them to me anymore. So, they are managing to filter somehow, which makes me happy.
MIGNON: That's great news. Yeah, I've been very concerned about the pollution of the information sphere from so much AI slop on the internet. And it used to show up in search, so nothing—I never saw anything with “lrtsj” or with non-words.
HEDDWEN: I was researching this just before this podcast, and there's even lrtsjerk.com. And if people want to see what I mean when I say AI slop and just hundreds of articles being pumped out, then do go there. Go to lrtsjerk.com. It won't hurt you. I didn't see that there weren't any dangerous ads or anything like that.
It's really just—I don't know why it exists. I don't know, but it's completely fake from top to bottom. Like nothing about it has anything to do with humans.
MIGNON: Amazing. That's fascinating. I think your theory makes a lot of sense, though, because I can imagine when the cost of producing content goes to almost zero with AI, if people can churn out a thousand articles a day, and you get into that long tail, right? Like in the past, people maybe were looking at the most searched terms, and now they're looking at all searched terms and trying to create blog posts that will attract just minuscule amounts of traffic for half a cent of ad revenue.
And so you get nonsensical things — that someone's cat walked across the keyboard and typed something into the Google search box.
HEDDWEN: That's really what it seems like, yes.
MIGNON: Amazing. Now, I have not heard that before. That is fascinating. Heddwen, thank you so much.
If you're a Grammarpalooza subscriber, stick around because actually in the bonus segment we're going to talk about Heddwen's translation work, translating difficult-to-translate words, and we'll have her three book recommendations. And it's going to be fascinating.
For the main segment listeners.
This is the end of the show, and thank you so much for listening. Heddwen Newton, where can people find you?
HEDDWEN: So I have a newsletter. It's on Substack. It's called English in Progress. So just Google "English in Progress" or "English in Progress Substack." That is probably the best place to find me. I am reasonably active on Bluesky, and I want to become more active on Threads, but I'm not quite there yet.
So Bluesky or Substack are the places to go.
MIGNON: I'll give you a warm welcome. And we'll put those links in the show notes. Thank you so much.