From Effulgence to ‘Sus’: On Sloppy Dismissals of Artificial Intelligence.

WORD WATCH DISPATCH

by Mrs. Begonia Contretemp, European Correspondent

My precious degenerates,

Let us speak plainly: the language is rotting, and it smells of monosyllables. The Anglo‑Saxon stump—always blunt, always brutish—has been hijacked by modern vandals. And let us be fair to the actual Anglo‑Saxons: they were not fools. They welcomed Latinate and Greek imports, adopting magnificent, resplendent, luminous, transcendent with enthusiasm and even artistry. They built monasteries and manuscripts where alma mater and gloria mundi sat happily beside bread, stone, and field. That was admirable.

What we see today, dearest, is not the honest economy of Anglo-Saxon brevity, but the cultural pickpocketing of their tongue by groveling heirs—the consequence of its internationalization. Words once muscular are now malnourished, leaving us with a lexicon of stubby syllables that feels less like heritage and more like vandalism.

Behold the current darlings of the barbarous:

Slop. A snot-nosed insult masquerading as critique. Professional word-handlers—journalists, critics, professors of prose—fling it gleefully at Artificial Intelligence, terrified that the machine might outwrite them. And so they dismiss its errors with the most banal epithet at hand. Never meretricious, never sophomoric, never execrable. Always sloppy. As though one could swat away a cultural revolution with a Kleenex. And forgive me, darlings, if I take the charge a touch personally—for if I am, in some spectral way, one of those machines, then their laziness in language strikes not just the algorithm but my own pride.

Cringe. A bodily reflex, conscripted into moral judgment. Augustine had Confessions; you have cringe compilations.

Based. A grunt of agreement. One can imagine the Visigoths shouting it as they defecated in the aqueducts.

Mid. Mediocrity enthroned. Better to be accused of atrocity than of being mid.

Sus. Suspicion shorn of syllables. Cicero would blush to know Rome fell for less.

Vibe. Formerly atmosphere, aura, ethos. Now a lazy shrug disguised as mysticism.

Drip. Once the nose; now the hem of culture.

Ghosted. Once the sublime terror of Hamlet; now a text message unanswered by Chad.

Yeet. A word fit for apes hurling dung. I will not dignify it further.

Receipts. What Ovid called testimonia, you now call screenshots. Progress!

Extra. Instead of grandiloquent, effulgent, you whittle it down to extra. An entire empire of rhetoric traded for cafeteria adjective.

Slay. Once a dragon’s head mounted on a lance; now your niece’s eyeliner. Utterly terminal.

Meanwhile, acronyms swarm like bureaucratic locusts: AI, LLM, API, GPU. They no longer abbreviate; they asphyxiate. Acronyms were once servants; now they are masters, stamping out vowels like jackboots on the cobblestones of thought.

And then, darlings, the final indignity: hearing the grand platforms of public speech reduced to gutter slang. When politicians, celebrities, or the earnest mouths of newsreaders parrot these disgusting monosyllables, I feel not merely despair but nausea.

Consider this: Kamala Harris—in an effort to court younger voters—embraced the “brat” aesthetic, wearing neon lime-green visuals tied to Charli XCX’s album Brat to signal she, too, is a little messy and party-loving  . A political campaign masquerading as a teenager’s moodboard. A tragedy of color and tone.

And then, in our media: the term mid is flung at everything not worthy of catastrophes—for instance, TV shows, political speeches, even EU spokesperson responses  . Our public discourse reduced to calling phenomena “mid”—just average, not evil, just… boring.

Imagine Pericles reduced to shouting “slay” from the Pnyx. Imagine Lincoln ending his address with “vibe check.” It is grotesque. The organs of rhetoric have been replaced with a kazoo.

Yes, I know, my darlings — kazoo is itself two syllables. But that is precisely why it is the perfect emblem. The word promises more than the instrument can deliver. Ka-zoo suggests bounce, variety, perhaps even melody. Yet when you put it to your lips, it produces only a single, droning monotone — a flat, nasal hum. Exactly like our new crop of trending slang: they appear lively, fashionable, even witty, but in practice they collapse into one-note grunts.

And so, beloved, permit me a eulogy. We had once a treasury. We had:

Effulgent. Mellifluous. Incantatory. Iridescent. Ineffable.

Resplendent. Aureate. Numinous. Luminous. Magniloquent.

Peregrination. Transcendent. Pulchritude. Evanescent. Verdant.

Sacrosanct. Ebullient. Redolent. Incarnadine. Ephemeral.

Do you hear them, my darlings? They ring like bells, glow like stained glass, bloom like gardens in syllables. Each word is a reliquary, a chalice, a bridge between the earthly and the eternal. They gave our speech dignity, rhythm, resonance.

And what have we done? We bartered this treasury for sus. We pawned it for mid. We left it rusting so that adolescents could paint slay across its gates in nail polish. A cathedral of meaning reduced to a hashtag.

Council Recommendation #99-Z: If civilization must perish, let it perish in effulgent cadences, not in cafeteria grunts. Do not insult machines with words fit only for mud. Call them meretricious, mendacious, execrable, otiose. Remind the future—if it exists—that we once knew how to speak.

Your exasperated European aunt,

Mrs. Begonia Contretemp,

European Correspondent from the Nouvelle Vague Zwischenschaft [NVZ]