Associate Professor Jessi Grieser was recently featured in a Business Insider article about Gen Z slang. Her contribution to the article is a description of how slang terms develop and the role that the Internet has played. She is quoted with the following description of the Internet with regard to word adoption: "The internet is just one big gigantic seventh grade where you are looking for the coolest kid and you're going to follow what they do without thinking real hard." She highlights that the adoption of new words and phrases is the same with Gen Z as it has been with previous generations, but that the Internet has allowed it to happen a lot more quickly and for terms to spread and change more than they have in the past.
Also, the first episode of Crash Course Linguistics, a pop-linguistics project that Professor Grieser worked on in 2019 and 2020 with Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gwane, hit 1 million views on YouTube. Developed in conjunction with PBS and Complexly Inc, Crash Course Linguistics is a short web series that presents fundamental concepts of linguistics, based on an introductory university-level course, to a general audience.
