Social Media Alter Vocabulary
Social media impacts our language by altering the meaning of some of our vocabulary. Let’s take Pinterest, for example. Built to allow its users to mark and sort interesting, new ideas, the social media platform has changed the way we view the words “pin,” “pinning” and “pinned.” We know these words to be representative of a physical pin with which we are able to pin a project or paper to a corkboard. Here, in the online world, “pinning” is descriptive of a similar concept, just to a board that only exists digitally. We then hear our social media cohorts saying things like, “Check out my pin,” or “I was pinning this morning while I had my coffee.”