"Bops" versus "bruzz": "whores" or "mates," the reductive message of a war between influencer houses on TikTok

Forget the words "slut," "bitch," or "racoleuse." Now, we say "bop." " Bop has gone viral. It's all because of this war between the two content houses, Bop House and Bruzz House: they've set the networks ablaze." Interviewed by email, Adam Aleksic, a 24-year-old Serbian-American linguist and Harvard graduate, is visibly getting worked up. Author of the book Algospeak (1) , recently published in English (July 25, by Knopf), he is sounding the alarm: online censorship , on TikTok or YouTube, is fostering the proliferation of neologisms that are now taking hold offline, and this "is not trivial," he warns.

The emergence of the word "bop" in everyday language provides proof— "yet another"—that social media is changing the way we speak. It's profoundly disrupting our relationship with words, especially sexual words, which have become taboo. We no longer dare to utter them. We replace them with euphemisms. "Take 'bop' . Just a few months ago, no one knew the expression," insists Adam Aleksic.

If we are to believe the researcher, who devotes a special video to "bop"