Content for Content’s Sake

Language is constantly evolving, particularly in some communities. Not everybody is ready for it at all times. I, for instance, cannot stand that my community is now constantly “cooking” or “cooked”, that people in it are “locked in” or “cracked.” I don’t like it, because the use of the words primarily signals membership of a group rather than one’s individuality. But some of the changes to that language might now be coming from … machines? Or maybe not. I don’t know. I, like many others, noticed that some words keep showing up more than before, and the obvious assumption is that LLMs are at fault. What I did was take 90 days’ worth of my local coding sessions and look for medium-frequency words where their use is inflated compared to what wordfreq would assume their frequency should be. Then I looked for the more common of these words and did a Google Trends search (filtered to the US). Note that some words like “capability” are more likely going to show up in coding sessions just…