I can be a language prescriptivist like this, and the increase in overuse and misuse of psychological terminology is very very significantly due to how it proliferates and warps on TikTok.

(Though of course this also occurs on other social media platforms, and bleeds over between them, and into other cultural spaces.)

(But, with TikTok specifically, we have academic studies showing that around half of the 'psychological advice' given on TikTok is significantly misleading, and a portion of that is found to be dangerously misleading, when evaluated for actual accuracy by actual psychologists. Its misinformation, definitionally.)

These are technical terms, and their broad overuse and misuse by lay people who don't know what the fuck they're talking about is a significant problem.

This is such a significant problem that many psychologists on TikTok and YouTube have videos calling out how much of a problem this is, how perverted psychology terminology is now at the point where it serves as a dialect by which narcissistic abusers can manipulate people and avoid responsibility and accountability.

I don't care that some particular story from some particular book may or may not have served as a a starting point for one of these terms to be misunderstood by laypeople, beyond an etymological sense of understanding the process by which this has occured for that particular term.

I care about the harm caused by the weaponization of language.

That a bunch of people are confused and wrong about something does not make them....valid in their misuse of words.

It makes them into psuedo-experts (where psuedo means basically 'false' or 'fake'), misusing technical terminology the same way that woo peddlers and scammers and con artists and grifters do.

NewSpeak is ultimately the concept of manipulating language such that certain previously thinkable concepts become unthinkable. In 1984, this is done in a deliberate, top down, mandated fashion.

What Orwell did not forsee (or at least, exemplify in 1984) was the nature of mass digital communications, the proliferation of basically absurd amounts of nonsense, as another means of making the communication of certain concepts very difficult.

TherapySpeak is extremely good at providing a toolset for social manipulators to criticize anyone who criticizes any of their actions or choices, of reframing themselves as either being reasonable and fair, or as themselves actually being the victim.

So, through a more complex process, it becomes much more difficult, much less socially acceptable for people who have been harmed by these kinds of manipulative people to express and describe that harm.

Orwell did not forsee that this could happen in a bottom up fashion... but its not truly a bottom up fashion.

Corporate social media uses algorithims that primarily optimize based amount the amount of rage that they cause, optimize based around the amount of controversy they cause.

Then, they crowd source the content.

Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard

Zuck: Just ask.

Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS

[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?

Zuck: People just submitted it.

Zuck: I don't know why.

Zuck: They "trust me"

Zuck: Dumb fucks

This functions as an insidious, warped way of manipulating all of culture such that it rewards self centered egomaniacs, and also strongly encourages the formation of literal cults.

Its a more complex way that a top down paradigm of media established by the powerful leads to the seemingly natural and unplanned growth/evolution of language...

... but its no more natural than the artificial selection of wheat or various dog breeds by humans over centuries and eons.

It just happens much faster, and seemingly unintentionally, from the standpoint of the crowd whose ideas are being selectively promoted or demoted by those who wrote and control the algorithms, the crowd that has forgotten that the water they are swimming in is an artificially constructed hyperreality, which is directed with intention by those who control it.

Mybe.

👮‍♂️ stop criminal scum! 🛑

I love cats.