Speak in Ruins: How Young Creators Are Turning Dead Slang Into a Living Art Form

There's a word from early 19th-century American slang — absquatulate — that means to abruptly leave or flee. It fell out of common use somewhere around the Civil War era. But scroll through certain corners of Tumblr today, and you'll find it stitched into captions, painted onto zine covers, and dropped casually into Discord conversations as if it never left. Nobody's confused. Everyone's delighted.

This is the vibe at the center of a quietly radical creative movement: the deliberate resurrection of obsolete, forgotten, and culturally buried language as an aesthetic and political act. Gen Z — a generation raised on SEO-optimized content, engagement-chasing vocabulary, and the homogenizing grind of platform-speak — is pushing back. And they're doing it with words that the internet forgot to monetize.

The Algorithm Made Language Boring

Here's the uncomfortable truth about how we talk online now: the platforms trained us. TikTok's recommendation engine rewards clarity and accessibility. Instagram captions evolved to be skimmable. Even Twitter — rest in chaotic peace — punished obscurity with silence. Over time, the language that performs well online started to feel like the only language worth using.

But performance and expression aren't the same thing. A growing number of young artists, writers, and community builders noticed the gap and started filling it with something the algorithm genuinely can't optimize: words it's never seen before.

"There's no SEO value in using the word snollygoster," says one visual artist who runs a newsletter dedicated to 19th-century American political slang. "That's exactly why I love it. It's mine in a way that 'authentic' and 'vibe' will never be again."

Snollygoster, for the record, is an 1800s term for a shrewd, unprincipled politician. It's making a quiet comeback in underground political zines, and honestly? It fits.

Tumblr's Linguistic Time Capsule

If you want to understand where this movement found its footing, you have to go back to Tumblr. Not current Tumblr — though it's still there, still weird, still beloved — but the Tumblr of 2012 through 2016, which functioned as an unintentional archive of micro-dialects that existed nowhere else on the internet.

Cottagecore communities developed their own ornate, almost Victorian speech patterns. Fandom spaces generated entire internal vocabularies that read like dispatches from alternate linguistic universes. Fanfiction writers blended Regency-era prose with contemporary emotion in ways that were genuinely new. None of it was optimized. All of it was expressive.

Young creators today are treating those archives the way music historians treat old field recordings: as primary sources. They're pulling phrases, cadences, and entire rhetorical styles out of decade-old posts and feeding them into new work — visual art, song lyrics, poetry collections, even the way they structure their own online presence.

The effect is uncanny in the best way. It feels familiar and foreign at once, like hearing a melody you can't quite place.

AOL as Irony, AOL as Sincerity

Then there's the early-2000s AOL Instant Messenger stratum — a whole geological layer of dead internet language that Gen Z is excavating with genuine enthusiasm. "A/S/L?" "BRB." "TTYL." "Ur so 2 kewl." These phrases feel like artifacts from a more innocent era of the internet, before the platforms got good at keeping us there.

In underground music scenes — particularly lo-fi bedroom pop, hyperpop, and certain DIY punk spaces — AIM-era slang is showing up as a kind of ironic authenticity marker. It signals that you're old enough to remember a time before the algorithm, or at least that you've done the research to understand what that felt like. But the irony is increasingly giving way to something more sincere.

"When I use that language in my lyrics, it's not a joke," explains one Chicago-based artist who records under a deliberately misspelled username. "It's grief. I'm mourning something. The internet used to feel like it belonged to us. Now it belongs to whoever can afford the ad spend."

That emotional register — nostalgia sharpened into something political — is what separates this movement from simple retro aesthetics. It's not about thinking the past was better. It's about recognizing that certain kinds of expression got lost in the professionalization of online culture, and actively choosing to bring them back.

Dead Words as Radical Infrastructure

Beyond individual artistic practice, some communities are building entire cultural infrastructures around forgotten vocabulary. There are Discord servers dedicated to cataloging extinct subculture slang from niche forums that no longer exist. There are zine collectives that publish glossaries of obsolete regional American slang as their primary editorial content. There's at least one Substack — with a surprisingly healthy subscriber count — that publishes a new dead word every week alongside an original piece of art inspired by its etymology.

The energy in these spaces is collaborative and almost archival, but it's also deeply playful. Nobody's treating this like a museum. They're treating it like a living language, because that's exactly what it becomes when people start using it again.

There's a linguistic concept called reclamation — the process by which a community takes ownership of language that was used against them, or that was lost to them, and reshapes it on their own terms. What's happening here is something adjacent to that, but stranger and more expansive. It's the reclamation of expressiveness itself. Of the right to use words that don't optimize, don't perform, don't generate clicks.

What Gets Saved When Language Survives

Language doesn't just carry meaning. It carries the texture of the moment it came from — the social conditions, the humor, the anxieties, the possibilities that existed when those words were in circulation. When young creators reach back into the linguistic past, they're not just finding cool-sounding words. They're recovering ways of seeing the world that got buried under the weight of platform culture.

Lollygag. Hornswoggle. Kerfuffle. Brouhaha. These words carry a kind of delighted chaos that modern internet vocabulary largely abandoned in favor of precision and shareability. Bringing them back is, in a small but real way, an act of resistance against the flattening of experience that algorithmic culture requires.

And maybe that's the most Manefon thing about all of this: the unconventional isn't always found in new inventions. Sometimes it's waiting in the ruins of what we already had, patient and strange, ready to mean something again the moment someone decides to say it out loud.

Absquatulate the feed. The words are waiting.