Our language has a peculiar bias, not unlike that friend who keeps trying to sell you cryptocurrency at dinner parties. We eagerly name the shiny new toys of capitalism—cryptocurrencies, influencers, NFTs—because they need instant legitimacy to part people from their money. Yet when it comes to naming the actual human experiences that define our daily lives, we're left flailing like medieval peasants confronted with a microwave. "Behold," we gesture wildly, "the food-warming light box of mystery!"

This absence of words doesn't just leave gaps in our conversations. It leaves us all performing an elaborate pantomime of modern life. It's as if we're all playing the world's longest game of charades, and the category is "Things That Happen Every Day But We Can't Describe."

Consider how "doom-scrolling" rapidly infiltrated our lexicon, thanks to social media companies helpfully pointing out (and monetizing) our collective addiction to bad news. Yet we still lack a word for that specific moment of digital betrayal when your computer, sensing the high stakes of your presentation, decides that now—with fifteen colleagues watching—is the perfect time to freeze or glitch. Perhaps we could call it "presentastrophe" or "glitchpitch," but neither quite captures the existential horror of watching your slides transform into a contemporary art installation while your audience slowly loses faith in your competence.

The social media overlords get "engagement metrics," while we're left without a word for that 3 a.m. realization that you've somehow ended up deep in your ex's new partner's cousin's wedding photos from 2016. Let's call that "stalknowledge"—information you didn't need, acquired at an hour you shouldn't have been awake, that you can never unknow. It's like accidentally learning how hot dogs are made, but for your dignity.

Silicon Valley keeps churning out words like "metaverse" to sell us virtual realities, yet we haven't named that mortifying moment during a video call when you've been passionately speaking, only to realize you've been on mute the entire time. Let's call it "mute-mare"—the silent monologue delivered to an audience that never heard a word of it, like a Shakespeare play performed exclusively for your houseplants.

This vocabulary vacuum isn't just annoying – it's reached the point of absurdity. We've created words for every possible way to monetize a TikTok dance, yet we're still saying "you know, that thing where..." to describe universal human experiences. It's like we're all playing an endless game of Password while Silicon Valley keeps inventing new ways to lose at it.

This isn't entirely unprecedented. Back in 1984 (the book, not the year – though honestly, both work here), Orwell imagined a world where language was deliberately shrunk to limit thought. The powers-that-be created "Newspeak," a language so efficiently awful it made "doubleplusgood" an actual word. Imagine being the person in that meeting: "Hey, what if we just stack prefixes like Lego blocks until language loses all meaning?" And everyone else just nodding along, probably while saying "synergy" a lot.

But here's the thing about humans and language:

For every corporate attempt to sanitize our speech with terms like "engagement metrics" and "algorithmic content curation," there's a tired office worker somewhere inventing words like "procrasturbake" – the art of making unnecessarily elaborate pastries to avoid finishing your quarterly reports.

Think of Silicon Valley as a well-meaning but deeply confused descendant of Big Brother. Instead of eliminating words to control thought, they're creating new ones to control behavior. But they've missed something fundamental: humans will always find ways to name their experiences, especially the awkward ones. It's like linguistic natural selection – the words that actually describe our lives will survive, while "Web3" quietly joins "groovy" in the linguistic retirement home.

Consider that moment when you realize you've been staring at your phone so long you've forgotten why phones were invented in the first place. That's not "extended user engagement" – that's a "scroll hole," and we've all been there, emerging bleary-eyed at 2 AM wondering if we've actually achieved enlightenment or just temporal dementia. It's like meditation, but instead of inner peace, you get targeted ads for whatever you were just thinking about.

Or take that masterful move when you pretend your internet is unstable to escape yet another meeting that should have been a text message. That's not "connectivity issues" – that's a "Glitch Ditch," and it's practically a survival skill in our over-Zoomed world. (Pro tip: freezing your face in a thoughtful expression works better than panic. Think "contemplative statue" rather than "deer in headlights.")

While Silicon Valley is busy trying to convince us that "algorithmic content curation" is a normal phrase humans should say out loud, we can call things what they actually are: a "ReplyAllpocalypse" is just that moment when someone accidentally hits reply all, and suddenly your inbox is hosting an impromptu support group for people begging to be removed from the thread.

So consider this your invitation to join the linguistic rebellion.

Because in a world where "blockchain" is considered a legitimate word, who's really going to judge you for calling your mid-meeting snack anxiety a "zoomunch"?

After all, if we're going to be trapped in this bizarre digital future, we might as well name it something that makes us laugh. And who knows? Maybe somewhere, a medieval peasant is looking at our attempts to name modern life and thinking, "At least they're trying. Now, how do I explain this microwave to my friends?"

Thanks for reading this weeks Big Dumb Idea

SHARE YOUR NEW DUMB WORDS OR PHRASES: Reply with your own acts of linguistic rebellion and I’ll give the best 5 some shine in the next newsletter AND a signed copy of "Dumbify"!

Stay wonderfully rebellious, David

P.S. Know someone who needs permission to be dumb? Forward this email—sometimes the dumb way is the smart way forward.