Whoa: toxic, resilience, Rizzler — all cry out to Zippy as he makes his critical way along a forest path, deprecating — despite their (respective) colorfulness, exactness, and freshness — the way these expressions are overused:
In the Zippy strip of 5/17, the forest is alive with the sound of lexical lamentation — with 14 such sounds, to be specific
For each of them, you might feel that you’re legitimately complaining that you’ve been hearing the expression often in recent times, though this impression is obviously going to depend a lot on who you hang out with (Rizzler has a minuscule role in my life. and my bad not much of one; consequently, I find them notable, but not because they seem to be used too much).
Now, people choose — mostly tacitly, not through conscious planning — to use certain expressions for reasons; people choose them because they have some function in the speakers’ and writers’ lives. The usual critique of overuse amounts to the claim that people are making their choices entirely on the basis of stylishness, choosing certain expressions merely because they are fashionable, stylish, with-it, what (they believe to be) the cool people are saying; and that this is reprehensible, because people are making choices just to show off that they’re in whatever counts as the in crowd for them and not on the basis of some more abstract goodness of fit of expressions for conveying particular meanings.
But talking this way just puts things back onto the question of where these styles come from. There’s room there for a certain amount of historical accident, but there are also reasons why certain expressions might get some social traction, through their values or virtues. Specifically, the values of colorfulness, exactness, and freshness. I will ilustrate all three from Zippy’s 14.
colorfulness / vividness. Consider the use of toxic ‘poisonous’ (in expressions like toxic masculinity) to convey, hyperbolically, harmful / dangerous. We don’t need another way to say ‘harmful, dangerous’, but the extravagance of toxic evokes the vivid imagery of a grisly death from poisoning. So it’s a good thing to have. (But if we use it a lot, we risk having its vividness erode, and we end up with just another sense of toxic.)
exactness. We have existing vocabulary, but nothing quite conveying the particular meaning we want, so we adopt figurative language conveying the subtlety we’re after. Suppose we want to convey the desirable behavioral capacity:
adaptability / flexibility + toughness / durability
rizz is an internet slang word defined as style, charm, or attractiveness. It is likely short for charisma. [cf. fridge for refrigerator and flu for influenza]
The phrase was popularized by American YouTuber and Twitch streamer Kai Cenat in mid-2021, with it being used among his friend group long before. It subsequently garnered virality on the social media application TikTok
… As a verb, rizz can be used to describe using charisma to attract someone, as to rizz up a person.
… Further development of the word rizz includes Rizzler or Rizz God, meaning [someone who is] highly charismatic, and Unspoken Rizz, meaning a person’s ability to attract a person without speaking
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