About this Event
Are we cooked?The internet has ushered in an unprecedented linguistic upheaval. New slang emerges and goes viral overnight. Accents are shaped or erased on YouTube. Grammatical rules, loopholes, and patterns surface and transform our interactions, social norms and habits. And with over 7 billion internet users, the sheer volume of potential new words is astounding.In Algospeak, online etymologist Adam Aleksic embarks on an energetic, astonishing journey into language and the internet; revealing the bigger social story of how language shapes us, just as much as we shape it.
Adam Aleksic is a linguist and content creator posting educational videos as the “Etymology Nerd” to an audience of over three million. As a linguistics student at Harvard College, he founded and served as president of the Harvard Undergraduate Linguistics Society. He’s discussed online language on NPR, repeatedly contributed to The Washington Post, and his work has been mentioned in The New York Times, The Economist, and The Guardian. He’s lectured on language and social media at Stanford, Yale, Georgetown, and other top universities, including a TEDx talk at the University of Pennsylvania. Adam is based in New York City, where he spends a lot of time scrolling TikTok for "research".Sophia Smith Galer is an award-winning journalist and the author of How To K*ll A Language. She writes and broadcasts about language, technology and culture and her content has been viewed more than 200 million times. Following a career at the BBC and VICE News, Sophia pioneered vertical video journalism in the UK and now runs a social media consultancy called Viralect. She is a winner of the Georgina Henry Prize, the British Journalism Award for Innovation, and Celebrity Christmas University Challenge on BBC Two.
Event venue & nearby stays
Waterstones, 82 Gower Street, London, United Kingdom
Concerts, fests, parties, meetups — all the happenings, one place.