The offensiveness of group-speak

Why we must find our own words

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.

— George Orwell

Illustration by Pawel Kuczynski

In the past, an accent revealed where you came from, now it’s your vocabulary that gives away which part of the internet you live on. I can’t say I find this development endearing.

If there is one issue of grave importance to me it is how we retain individuality and clear thinking, in a time where social media encourages imitation, the hunger for relevancy, and a return to the self-consciousness that plagued us in adolescence. In short, I’m interested in how we grow up amid technologies that encourage emotional and intellectual regression.

I left school, naively thinking it was over, still unaware of how collectivist behaviour functioned outside of its gates. Little did I know that in years to come a regressive force would arrive in the form of social media, where users would self-infantilise, not just because young people dominate the platforms and shape its culture, but because it's a “social” technology, where the same pressures and dynamics from school tend to emerge wherever large groups of people congregate.

One of the best parts of leaving school is that one’s interests and language no longer have to be shaped by fleeting fads. But the return to adolescent self-consciousness finds its clearest expression in our speech. Online culture has birthed a new dialect—what my friend

lara

calls, ‘Internese’: a blend of therapy speak, meme lingo, ready-made phrases and political buzzwords. Whether it’s words as common as ‘gaslight’, ‘mid,’ or ‘based’, ‘problematic’, and countless others, I personally can’t use them without feeling like I'm performing for a specific corner.

It’s not that I think there is something wrong with playfully using internet phrases and slang. I’m fond of the digital expression “life is life-ing” and will continue to say it long after it expires. It succinctly captures the inherent ups and downs of existing without needing to over-explain. It’s one of the few internet-born phrases that feels honest.

Overall, Internese can be harmless—often reflecting which corners of online culture we find amusing. For others, it could be an unconscious way of signalling one is up to date and, perhaps, even ‘relevant’ in a world where digital fluency is its own form of currency.

But group-speak is like a linguistic tattoo, marking where you plot yourself on the political spectrum. Want to show that you’re tolerant and inclusive? Throw in something about ‘centering’ or ‘decentering voices’ a few times. Eager to show you’ve broken free from the chains of progressive sensitivities? Refer to everything you find idiotic as ‘retarded’.

Beyond the fact that I see internet addiction as a form of self-harm and view the overuse of Internese as a display of just how out of control the dependence has become — there’s a deeper reason we should resist group-speak.

When too many popular phrases dominate our vocabularies, they don’t just shape how we speak, they shape how we think, and erode trust in what we say. But perhaps the most important reason to avoid group-speak is that it limits self-understanding and dulls our ability to grasp the motivations of others.

For instance, if you’ve adopted the habit of rebranding disagreement as ‘gaslighting’, then the person with the opposing view is no longer someone with a different perspective, but a malicious manipulator. Feeling as though you’ve been psychologically abused then justifies lashing out instead of engaging charitably.

The more things are interpreted this way, the more conspiratorial your view of others becomes. When ordinary human behaviour is regarded as narcissism, love-bombing, gaslighting, and erasure, it is no wonder people feel perpetually unsafe, or under siege, not necessarily because the world has grown crueler, but because our vocabulary has made it harder to distinguish conflict from harm and difference from danger.

Words like “trauma,” “gaslighting,” or “toxic” can be useful. But when overused, they collapse complexity into cliche. This distorts how we understand our own emotional lives — making ordinary discomfort feel pathological, or turning interpersonal tension into psychological warfare. Over time, we lose the ability to differentiate between unpleasant, unfair, and unsafe.

I have one theory of how we got here. In an attention economy, we’re all incentivised to describe our experiences in ways that capture the most eyes. And in recent years, our cultural understanding of abuse has expanded to include psychological and emotional harm. But on social media, where cruelty dominates, people need to find a way to separate their anti-social actions from those they criticise in others. “Abuse” has become one of the few accusations that reliably elicits outrage, sympathy, and consequence. In essence, abuse is one of the only forms of destructive behaviour we take seriously.

Because of this, we’re encouraged to describe even ordinary interpersonal conflict in the language of pathology and melodramatic categories. So we start treating every slight like persecution because exaggeration is the only way to make pain legible.

In political discourse, it appears to be more important for people to signal allegiance than to persuade. After all, it takes more mental effort to change minds than reinforce what the like-minded already think. But for those of us who see value in engaging with people who don’t think alike, and aren’t convinced they’re all beyond reason, what gets in the way of effective dialogue is the reliance on team language over individual expression.

A variety of ready-made phrases—“not all cultures are equal,” “facts don’t care about your feelings,” “centering marginalised voices,” “transwomen are women”—along with buzzwords like woke, problematic, snowflake, allyship, groomer, and privilege, function less as tools of clarity and more like tribal markings.

When they’re used people don’t hear your point, but all the baggage they associate with your side.These words, and many others, give the receiver permission to stop thinking and start assuming.

He called my care for the less fortunate “virtue signalling” — so he must be unempathetic, or a closet bigot. Or, she said I was “blinded by privilege” — so clearly she’s a radical who thinks men are evil and the family should be abolished.

At that point the conversation is no longer between two people, but between two caricatures of opposing camps.

Once you’re seen as a stand-in for a broader ideology, rather than a person with a perspective, it’s nearly impossible to be understood on your own terms. Any thoughtful point gets filtered through assumptions about your ‘side’ and any chance of mutual understanding shrinks. In this way, group-speak doesn’t just simplify language, it simplifies people.

One reason for the general distrust in politicians is their reliance on insincere, hollow language. Their fondness for euphemisms, vague statements, and slogans in place of anything substantial. In the aftermath of tragedy, we’ve all seen politicians issue statements that feel interchangeable, as if they’re all reading from the same cue card. And when individuals adopt group-speak, they provoke similar distrust. To those who don’t share the outlook, it doesn’t come across as thoughtful or principled — it sounds like you don’t really know what you’re talking about.

And they might have a point, if you can’t talk about the topic you claim to be passionate about in your own words.

This piece is called The offensiveness of group-speak, not because I feel personally insulted each time I encounter Internese, but as Rebecca Solnit put it, “precision, which comes from attentiveness, is a form of respect.” My problem isn’t just that group-speak can be irritating or signal a lack of thought, it is that it betrays a deeper indifference to the intricacy of how we think and feel. It flattens what is textured. It ignores how layered our experiences are, and how intimacy and insight are built through precision not mimicry.

I’m especially taken aback because group-speak is adopted by many who’ve reached an age where we should be more at home within ourselves, yet there's still this misplaced eagerness to fit in by adopting the latest meaningless phrases and edgy internet slang.

But what saddens me most is the growing tendency to outsource our thinking to viral slogans—not just because it’s lazy, but because it suggests we’ve either forgotten or never discovered the gems buried beneath the rubble of digital sludge.

In a time offering endless ways to distract ourselves from thinking, it is crucial to resist the robotisation of our personalities—that digitally encouraged mass-produced version of the self that trades curiosity for correctness.

One essential way to do this is to start speaking in our own words— a quiet declaration that we are experts of our own experiences and no one else’s template will do.

If not, we not only limit our vocabulary, we dull our theory of mind. The ability to understand that people have thoughts, feelings, beliefs, desires and perspectives that differ from your own. It may seem like a basic understanding, but in practice, even the most educated amongst us often fall short.

Empathy may be widely upheld as the highest virtue, but it has, in many cases, become a buzzword used to justify what is essentially favouritism. Because to understand what someone feels, you first need a sense of what they are thinking. But if your emotional vocabulary is reduced to a set of stock phrases that task is much harder. As George Orwell observed in his essay, Politics and The English Language, “if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”

If hatred is always your go-to explanation for differences of opinion, you risk lacking the mental range to consider what might have shaped someone’s views. Rather than viewing disagreement as a natural outcome of differing values and perceptions, all you see is moral failing, which then colours everything you encounter.

The same flattening can happen in emotional life. If you always interpret the enthusiastic chemical rush of the honeymoon stage as ‘love-bombing’ you might overlook the possibility that early intensity can be an expression of excitement or wishful thinking, not necessarily a hidden ploy to control you.

Group-speak also encourages people to filter their experiences through what feels acceptable, not what feels true, as I saw in a recent conversation. A few months ago, I went to a friend’s dinner and was placed next to an attractive twenty-something Vietnamese woman. I don’t thrive at light conversation, so I kept it simple and asked what she’d been up to earlier that day. She was a part-time model and told me she’d been photographed at home for a skincare brand. She said she’d had fun and got on well with the small, friendly team who came to her flat. Then she added, almost reflexively, “but they were all white.”

Given that Britain is a predominantly white country, this didn’t strike me as particularly noteworthy, so I was unsure what she was trying to convey. Was she saying this because I’m black and assumed I’d naturally see that as a downside, given historical context? Was she implying she would’ve had a better time if the team had been racially diverse?

Never one to shy away from conversation that might be psychologically revealing, I probed, “why would that be an issue if you had a good time and they were friendly?”

I watched her search for an answer she couldn’t quite find—until the two people across from us cut in, asking what we were going to order from the menu. Had we not been interrupted, I doubt a coherent answer would have surfaced. Therefore, I was unsurprised that she changed the subject once the pair opposite left the conversation.

The words didn’t feel like hers, but a reflex drawn from variations of things she’d heard before. It was more like a bid for external validation over internal clarity because group-speak encourages us to echo the ‘right’ sentiments rather than reflect on experience.

I don’t think she was a racist, or meant any harm, more than anything, it felt like a desire to relate. A misguided attempt at solidarity. As is typical with group-speak, her words were selected to create an identity and connection through allegiance, rather than investigation. Despite enjoying the team's warmth, she chose to perform the values of the group she assumed I belonged to, because group-speak is knowing what to say to be accepted without always knowing why you’re saying it.

One reason we loathe social media is because it’s full of people opining on things they know nothing about and going on to generate ignorance and hysteria in their audience. A general rule I live by: if I can’t explain a topic in my own words, I don’t understand it well enough to speak on it publicly.

It’s a simple test, but a revealing one, especially in an online culture that rewards immediacy over reflection. Before posting, ask yourself: are there any thoughts or feelings I have about this that didn’t come from a viral post?

If the answer is no, that might be a sign to pause, not because you’re not allowed to have an opinion, but because you owe your voice the courtesy of making it your own.

If you suspect group-speak has seeped too deeply into your vocabulary, try:

• Writing down words you don’t fully understand.

• Finding synonyms for the ones you overuse.

• Making a list of words you love but rarely say.

• Recalling how you used to describe something before social media renamed it.

• Resisting the urge to diagnose. Describe the traits instead of labelling the condition.

• And above all, understanding an idea well enough that you can explain it simply.

Because if we fail to speak in our own words, we’ll go through life only ever saying half of what we truly mean. And in doing so, we’ll let others hear only a fraction of what we meant to share.

When all is said and done, it’s our words that remain with others. So we might as well make sure they’re honest—words that reflect who we are in full, not just the trends of the time we lived through.