SAN ANTONIO – STORY HIGHLIGHTS
- In 2000, UTSA linguistic students predicted what words would be used in 2025
- The time capsule was recently opened, revealing the answers
- Current UTSA students are now predicting what words will be used in 2050
DO YOU REMEMBER HOW YOU TALKED IN 2000?
Let’s go back to the year 2000. Y2K was freaking us all out, songs like ‘Smooth’ by Santana and ‘Say My Name’ by Destiny’s Child were topping the charts, and the Saint Louis Rams won the Super Bowl, and the word of year was ‘chad’. Why, you ask? Remember the infamous ‘hanging chad’ during the Bush and Gore 2000 presidential election? Chads, as it turned out, had a significant impact on our culture.
But, we were also saying things like ‘chillax’ and ‘sup,’ which brings us to why Dr. Bridgette Drinka, a linguistics professor at UTSA, decided to challenge her students.
“I just had all my students make predictions based on what they had been studying for how language tends to change,” explained Drinka.
A good lesson and an interesting one, especially considering she stored it in a time capsule in her office. She kindly invited me out for the unsealing ceremony ... and here’s what it revealed.
WHAT WORDS DID STUDENTS IN 2000 PREDICT WOULD BE USED IN 2025?
“I didn’t even have a cell phone in 1999,” explained Helen Petry Stowe, who contributed to the capsule at the turn of the century.
Drinka, a student in the UTSA Linguistics program at the time, contacted her to return for the capsule .
“I have no memory of contributing to this time capsule,” joked Stowe.
Still, she was intrigued enough to return a quarter of a century later to see what was inside.
[drumroll]
Turns out, Stowe guessed that the term “cell watch” would be used. That’s a good guess, considering Apple was only dealing with iPods at the time.
Other guesses:
Scrub (likely stemming from TLC’s monster hit around that time)
Dot-Commer (does anyone still say ‘dot com’?!)
Cyber Peace (calling for good behavior on the web)
Baby Daddy Drama (no explanation needed)
I won’t say they missed the mark, but ... no one guessed “no cap’,” “rizz” or “skibidi.” Just saying.
WHAT WILL THE KIDS BE SAYING IN 2050?
As we learned, predicting how language will change is not easy. The experts tell us you’ll have the most success guessing with these ideas in mind:
Think about acronyms, words we may borrow from other languages, adding a prefix or suffix to an existing word, blending words, or clipping a word. After all ‘rizz’ is short for charisma.
Rusafa Hussain will be graduating this year from UTSA with a certificate in linguistics.
“Slay ... oh yeah, you killed it ... you slayed,” explained Hussain when asked if she’d help me sound cool.
Hussain was also tasked with predicting what words students in 2050 would be using.
“Since Google and Apple are upping their glasses, instead of looking things up, we might say, oh I’ll scan it,” surmised Hussain.
Other guesses:
Botfished (when AI catfishes you on a dating app)
Quadriconductors (the next level of semiconductors)
WFH (what the fresh h*%l)
Brolationships (the level of bond between you and your boys)
Then, there was this frightening prediction about what we’ll be saying in the future:
“Whatever our AI overlords allow us to say.”