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Algospeak Examples Are Everywhere, and They're Erasing What Words Mean

Writer: Jane Isley
Jane Isley
1 day ago
5 min read


Algospeak examples are everywhere now, and most people scrolling past them have no idea how much meaning is quietly being erased in plain sight. Today it's words, words some readers may not want to see or even think about. Nothing will be described graphically and no images of harm will be shown, but plain definitions will appear, because the words themselves are what I'm examining. I've written a great deal about language from a religious perspective. How definitions shift, how meaning gets manipulated. I'm setting that aside today, because this issue stands on its own. Some may think it's trivial. As a human being, I don't.


Start With the Truth

Rape: “The penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim.” 


Sexual Assault: “Sexual assault happens when someone either touches another person in a sexual manner without consent or makes another person touch them in a sexual manner without consent. It includes unwanted kissing and the touching of someone’s genitals, breasts or bottom.”


The Swaps

For years now, and especially in recent months, I’ve watched a surge of censor-induced substitutions online. Words like grape, grape’d, grape‑ing, grapist, often paired with the 🍇 emoji, are used in place of rape.


And “SA” in place of sexual assault has become so normalized that people barely register it as a personal evasion. Worse, it swallows entire other categories of harm: molestation, incest, unwanted touching, sexual harassment, groping. Each is a distinct act with a distinct wound, yet all are flattened into two letters that could just as easily stand for a business term.


Some other examples are:

  • Sex → “seggs,” “shmex” 

  • Porn → “corn,” 🌽 

  • Vibrator → “spicy eggplant” 

  • Sex worker → “accountant” 

  • Kill/die/dead → “unalive,” “unalived” 

  • Suicide → “sewer slide,” “kermit sewer slide”


And then there is “mascara,” which is where this stops being about made-up words and starts being about real people.


The Julia Fox Incident

A TikTok user named Conor Whipple posted about his own sexual assault. He used “mascara” as the code word, the way the current trend called for. His caption read: “I gave this one girl mascara one time and it must’ve been so good that she decided that her and her friend should both try it without my consent.”


She wasn’t aware of the trend. She read the sentence literally, as a complaint about stolen makeup, and commented, “Idk why but I don’t feel bad for u lol.” I wouldn’t have commented myself, but I would have assumed the same thing.


When he replied, “You don’t feel bad that I was sexually assaulted?” she immediately deleted her comment and apologized privately and publicly. But the damage was already done. She was accused of condoning sexual assault and discrediting a survivor. I can’t imagine how either of them felt.


A Language Built to Outrun You

Nicole Holliday, a linguistics professor at Pomona College, spoke about this incident, saying that even someone online a lot might miss it, because everyone’s FYP (For You Page) looks different. (The app’s landing page where personalized videos are recommended by TikTok’s algorithm.)


TikTok sorts people, so a trend that feels universal inside one person's feed is invisible to other users. Forbes made the same point. Algospeak is niche and confusing to outsiders, and it is unfair to assume every user knows the context. There was a mix of reactions under different mascara trend posts; some got it, and others were very confused as to what was even going on.


That one word now carries multiple meanings, from a product to positive to extremely negative. How is anyone supposed to keep up with that, and how is it anyone’s fault for not knowing that mascara is now not only mascara?


Holliday answers that: “It’s changing really, really fast because the whole point of algospeak is to avoid censorship… Nobody can keep up with the life cycle of this slang because it’s moving too fast.” She calls it an unreasonable expectation for humans to track every new word TikTok (or any platform) introduces.


The moment a code word becomes common enough that people actually understand it, the algorithm catches on, the word gets flagged, and everyone moves to the next one. The vocabulary has to stay ahead of comprehension, or it stops working. It is a treadmill constantly running.


This trend, born from extreme censorship, guaranteed that Conor’s attempt to share his trauma would be misread. On the other side, people invent new meanings for words the rest of society has never heard, then get angry when we don’t understand them. That is honestly not fair to anyone. It minimizes tragedies, it guarantees misunderstandings, and it softens the harsh reality that these crimes happen at all.


What We Hand the Next Generation

Social media isn't going anywhere, whether that sits well with us or not. I'd love for there to be some flawless system that could dictate exactly what each age group encounters online, but no such thing exists. I'm not against censorship as a concept; a certain amount of it is genuinely necessary. The trouble is that there's no clean solution to what social media does to kids. What I object to is any arrangement that guards children from the word while leaving them wide open to the thing itself.


Of course we want to keep our children safe. But at what price? They're coming up with no stable vocabulary at all, only one that keeps shifting under them, without the words they could look up, ask a question about, or reach for if something happened to them. When everything gets sanitized for the sake of comfort, the emotional freight those words are supposed to carry gets stripped away with it.


Parents ought to be sitting down and talking honestly with their kids about rape, molestation, sexual assault, and harassment. Children need the actual terms, because that's what keeps them safe, not made-up internet substitutes and emojis. They need language that lets them say out loud if something was done to them, and they need to grasp what these acts mean in the real world. "Grape-ing" isn't a word, and the 🍇 emoji is not a tolerable substitute for something this horrific.


How is a young boy or girl supposed to become an adult with any compassion or moral clarity when the true words have been pulled out of their vocabulary and swapped for cutesy euphemisms and emojis, all so nobody in this thin-skinned culture has to feel uncomfortable?


The Part Nobody Wants to Face

If these atrocities weren't unfolding constantly, everywhere, despite every effort to scrub them out of view, there'd be no reason to cook up nonsensical code words to slip past a filter. Every one of these algospeak examples exists because the violence still exists.

Take away the word, and you have changed nothing but your own comfort.


© 2026 Jane Isley


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