New Words Marvel
Language breathes. Dictionaries opened their doors to thousands: petrichor finally named, gigil crossing oceans from Tagalog hearts, morto carrying Irish embarrassment across continents. Each word a technofossil in reverse and not debris but seed. Where analog crumbles into digital decay, new phonemes sprout from chat windows and kitchen tables, from Glasgow to Manila, Waterford to Johannesburg.
After warm rain falls
petrichor naming something
we always had known
The mouse jiggler hums on desks where we WFH, pretending presence while bed rotting through Sundays, doom-scrolling until brain fog sets in. A chatbot asks if I'm still there. Ghost kitchens feed nobody's neighbourhood. We've made words for our hollow industriousness, our productive stillness, our illuminated solitude, each term a hard pass at something we cannot quite refuse.
Screen glow at midnight
even the AI wonders
if we're still awake
But listen: teenagers shout skibidi at nothing and everything, absolutely delulu with joy, their rizz and aura untranslatable to us, perfect in their imperfection. A girl shows her butter skin lewk and someone says she ate and left no crumbs, bet. In Dublin, they're morto over spice bags; in Kuala Lumpur, tapau your nasi lemak with kaya on the side. The mouth remembers before the dictionary does. Alamak, how we've been speaking new languages all along.
Grandmother's recipe
lumpia rolls carrying words
the page can't hold yet
Perhaps this is the burnt toast theory of linguistics: what seems lost makes room for what must come. The broligarchy names itself. Gen Alpha coins snackable for their fractured attention, honest about their inheritance. Climavores choose with conscience; we practice eco-minimalism like prayer. Generative AI makes prose while we make slang, both of us biohacking meaning from the ruins of the old world, both of us marvelling that anything grows at all.
Sharp-sharp, we greet
this shoogly train of language
hold on, enjoy ride
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