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Emojis are just one of many ways that people self-bowdlerize naughty terms. You’ll still come across sex educators spelling the word “sex” as “s*x” or “s3x,” but the most frequently used alternative in the early 2020s didn’t involve a creative substitution or respelling. Instead, it introduced an entirely new sound sequence by modifying the k sound to a g sound. I’m talking, of course, about the word “seggs,” wholeheartedly embraced by creators in the infancy of TikTok. The hashtag #seggs has been used in more than 100,000 posts, #seggseducation shows up in more than 40,000 informative videos, and I’ve also heard my friends ironically use “seggs” offline. Rather than just respelling the word to something immediately phonetic like “secks,” people chose to make the word sound a little sillier, which is a very common pattern on social media. There’s also “nip nops” for “nipples”; “peen” for “penis”; and “kermit sewerslide” for “commit suicide.
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Adam Aleksic (Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language)