From Culture to Catchphrase

On language erosion, internet trends, and saying things without understanding them

The internet has done real damage to how people talk, how people think, and how language is understood and used.

Not just slang. Not just tone. But meaning.

Everything feels dumbed down now. Flattened into phrases that sound good but say nothing. Conversations are no longer conversations. They’re collections of catchphrases. Recycled words. Trendy sentences that people repeat because they’ve heard them enough times to believe they mean something.

And the phrase that irritates me the most, on a visceral level, is this one:

“Mental health is real.”

I cannot stand it.

Of course mental health is real. Mental health is an actual thing. It is not a rumor. It is not a theory. It is not something that needs to be validated into existence by a sentence that says absolutely nothing.

What people usually mean is that mental health is important. Or neglected. Or misunderstood. Or stigmatized. Or poorly supported. But instead of finding the right words, instead of saying what they actually mean, people default to this hollow phrase and move on.

Mental health is real.

Duh.

That phrase alone perfectly represents what the internet has done to language. It replaces thought with trend. Precision with repetition. Meaning with familiarity. And once enough people say something, it becomes accepted as “correct,” even if it’s lazy, inaccurate, or completely empty.

This doesn’t stop at mental health discourse either. It bleeds into everything.

Especially language that comes from Black communities.

AAVE has been flattened, stripped of context, and rebranded as “Gen Z slang” or “internet talk.” Phrases that had cultural grounding now float around disconnected from where they came from, who created them, and how they were actually used.

Words get picked up, misused, overused, and then discarded once the internet gets bored.

“Clock it.”

“You did that.”

“YN.”

I don’t even like saying that last one. I don’t like the term at all. I don’t like the N word, period. I don’t subscribe to the idea that reclaiming derogatory language is empowering when the language itself was designed to dehumanize. It doesn’t matter to me that it’s not the hard ER. To me, it’s all connected.

I’m not calling my partner that. I’m not calling my friends that. I’m not calling my family that. It feels disrespectful, full stop.

And yet now it’s thrown around casually. Online. In comments. In jokes. By people who have no connection to its weight or history. Then it gets rebranded again. Suddenly it’s just a “term.” Suddenly it belongs to everyone.

That’s how erasure works.

AAVE didn’t appear out of nowhere. It exists because Black Americans spoke a certain way, under specific social and historical conditions, long enough for it to be recognized as its own linguistic system. It was never an everybody thing.The internet just turned it into one.

The same thing happens with psychological language.

Everyone is suddenly a narcissist expert.

Everyone is diagnosing.

Everyone is labeling.

Everyone is repeating terms they heard once in a video with no understanding of what they actually mean.

Yes, knowledge is power. But shallow knowledge with no discernment is just noise.

It reminds me of that biblical idea about not arguing with fools. Not because people are unintelligent, but because someone who believes they are right, without understanding, cannot be reasoned with. They’ve learned just enough to feel confident, not enough to be accurate.

And this all circles back to culture. Media. Music.

Music used to reflect the times, but now the times feel empty. Songs are stuffed with internet phrases that don’t connect to anything real. They don’t reference shared experiences, emotions, or stories. They reference trends.

It’s catchy because it’s familiar.

It’s familiar because you’ve already heard it a thousand times online.

Not because it means something.

Repetition replaces substance.

People talk about “stimulation words.” About phrases they repeat all day because they like how they sound. I get that. I do it too, to a degree. But for a lot of people, it goes further. It shapes what they consume, how they think, what they tolerate. It becomes comfort instead of comprehension.

And all of it just feels… empty.

So yes. All of this to say, I really cannot stand the phrase “mental health is real.” Not because mental health doesn’t matter, but because language does. And when language loses meaning, everything built on top of it weakens too.

Her Social Impact

Happy that you’re here

If you’re new to this publication, I’m really glad you’re here. I’m planning to share more content in the future, so expect a mix of different topics and perspectives.