By Adetimilehin Inioluwa Victor
I have been thinking about how easily we now substitute expressions that communicate a reaction while leaving the reason behind that reaction almost untouched. “It’s giving.” “That’s crazy.” “This pepper is peppering.” Across global Gen Z internet culture and Nigerian slang, these expressions can carry humour, judgment, exaggeration, approval, disappointment or disbelief with very little explanation. Sometimes that compression is exactly the point. It is efficient, playful and socially legible. But it also raises the question – what happens when expressions that were useful as shorthand begin to replace the distinctions they were meant to summarise? We may still know what someone feels, but do we always know what they mean?
I am not arguing that slang is killing vocabulary. Language has always evolved through invention, distortion, borrowing, shortening and outright abuse of the rules. Sometimes a new expression captures something standard vocabulary never quite managed to capture. There is something beautiful about a community inventing a phrase, giving it a meaning that initially makes no sense outside the community, and then watching that meaning take on a life of its own. So the problem is not slang. The problem is what happens when the shortcut becomes a terminated thought.
Take “crazy”. We have stretched that word to do an astonishing amount of work. It can describe someone behaving irrationally, an unusual risk, an unexpected football result, an exceptionally beautiful person or an unbelievable story. Somehow, one word accommodates irrationality, unpredictability, absurdity, beauty, surprise and disbelief. But these are not the same things. A word can be flexible without every distinction collapsing into it.
The same problem appears in criticism. “That movie was shit.” Fine. But was the acting poor, the screenplay incoherent, the pacing terrible, the ending disappointing, or was it simply not to your taste? The sentence tells me that you disliked the movie. It does not necessarily tell me why. So here is my question: what happens when our language becomes increasingly good at expressing our reactions while becoming increasingly bad at expressing our reasons? Words do not merely contain thoughts after we have had them. They also give the mind categories with which to think.
“Vocabulary is, in a very real sense, an inventory of distinctions.”
A person who can distinguish grief from loneliness, regret from despair, or disappointment from loss has more than a larger vocabulary. They have more ways of recognising experiences that might otherwise blur together. The same is true of intellectual life. Being wrong is not the same as being misled. Disagreement is not contradiction. Correlation is not causation. Something can be offensive without being harmful, and unpopular without being untrue. Critical thinking depends upon our ability to keep such distinctions available.
This is where the conversation becomes more interesting than a complaint about vocabulary. Perhaps what we are witnessing is not simply a decline in words, but a decline in our appetite for distinctions. I do not mean every sentence needs to sound like a dissertation. Sometimes the movie really was just ass. Sometimes “this pepper is peppering” is exactly the right thing to say because the shared joke is the point. There is pleasure in linguistic economy.
The problem however begins, when the compressed expression becomes a substitute for the longer thought rather than shorthand for a thought we already possess. Someone can say, “That movie was ass,” and still know that the premise was promising, the dialogue wooden and the final act inconsistent with the story’s own logic. The person knows what they mean and has merely chosen not to unpack it. But there is another possibility: they genuinely do not know what they mean beyond “I did not like it.”
Critical thinking is not simply knowing more facts. It is the discipline of refusing to let our first interpretation become our final interpretation. It asks us to stay with an idea long enough to interrogate our own reaction. What exactly happened? What do I actually mean? What evidence supports this conclusion? Am I describing what happened, or how I feel about what happened? Could there be another explanation?
It is much easier to say, “This is crazy.” It is harder to say, “I find this irrational because the decision appears to contradict the stated objective, although there may be information available to the decision-maker that I do not have.”
“The first is a reaction. The second is an argument.”
We see the same elasticity elsewhere. Everything is “iconic”, “problematic”, “toxic”, “trauma”, “genius”, “disrespect” or “gaslighting”. Words that once carried relatively specific meanings become broad enough to accommodate almost any emotional response. Language changes, and meanings evolves. That is part of how language survives. But when a word can describe almost anything, we should occasionally ask whether it is still helping us describe anything precisely.
This matters because the ability to distinguish is one of the foundations of judgment. If every disagreement feels like an attack, it becomes harder to evaluate an argument. If everything that contradicts us is “nonsense”, it becomes harder to evaluate evidence. At some point, language can stop helping us examine reality and start helping us avoid it.
The relationship between vocabulary and critical thinking is not direct enough to reduce to cause and effect. Language reflects the way we think, but it can also shape the way we think. We make distinctions and create words for them; those words then make the distinctions easier to recognise. The reverse can happen too. Broad words become sufficient, so we stop reaching for more precise ones. Eventually, the distinctions themselves become harder to articulate.
This is why I am less interested in whether people know fewer words than in whether we are becoming comfortable with words that are amorphous. The internet makes this especially visible because it rewards speed, recognition and emotional immediacy. Nuance takes time, and explanation requires attention. A complicated thought does not always fit neatly into a caption, a comment or a viral post. But “crazy” fits. “It’s giving” fits. “Whole ass nonsense” fits. The algorithm does not necessarily care whether the thought is complete. It cares whether the words spark engagement.
Perhaps, without realising it, we have started to communicate in ways that resemble the medium through which our communication now passes through: shorter, faster, more recognisable, more immediately consumable. Sometimes I wonder whether we are still communicating ideas or merely signalling reactions.
Your first reaction can be, “This is crazy.” Fine. But then what? What exactly is crazy about it? “It’s not giving.” Fine. Giving what? What did you expect, and what did you actually get? The phrase can remain. The slang can remain. Perhaps even the whole ass thing can remain. But the thought should not end there.
The real death of vocabulary would not be the disappearance of words from dictionaries. It would be our declining willingness to reach for the word that is more accurate when the approximate word is good enough. Perhaps the issue is not that we are losing vocabulary so much as losing the appetite for precision. Vocabulary gives us handles with which to hold reality. The richer the distinctions available to us, the more precisely we can describe what we see, feel and believe, and the more precisely we can interrogate them.
This is why I am not particularly worried about someone saying, “This is whole ass nonsense.” I am more interested in what happens when I ask them, “Why?” and they have nothing more to say. That is where the problem begins, when the shortcut becomes the destination. Language should help us compress thoughts we have already had. It should not become a substitute for having them.
And that is the whole ass thing.
About the Author
Vic’Adex is the literary and cultural identity of Adetimilehin Inioluwa Victor, a Nigerian author, poet and communications strategist whose work across poetry, essays, performance and cultural projects explores memory, identity, faith, power, heritage and the changing conditions of African life. He is the founder of 60 Seconds Poetry and Open Mic Ogbomoso.