Where did this term come from, and why do we bother to use it?
Censorship algorithms in social media. Rather than have someone look into the content to check for appropriateness the app often uses an AI to pick up use of some terms and reduce visibility or demonetize what may not be family-friendly, so as to hinder searches you may not want the kids making.
I almost exclusively see it in place of “suicide”. My guess is that was the initial usage, and that from there it’s slowly spread to an alternative for “killed” or “died”. I’m pretty sure, however, that the initial use was to avoid saying “suicide”, as in “John Doe unalived himself”.
I can’t answer your first question, but the answer to your second one is dead easy:
Because people are sheep. Look how little time it took for people to start using “gifted” in place of the perfectly good verb, “give”.
And for what it’s worth, it started because of censorship algorithms and then moved into ironic usage on other platforms and now nobody knows if they’re using it ironically anymore.
“Unalived” is just one example of a bigger issue of self-censoring words that AI filters might not like. Today I saw a post mentioning h**g school. It censored the word “high”.
As “h**g”??
It’s one example of what’s called “algospeak”. These are new words that have appeared in the era of social media. i just finished a book called Algospeak by an author named Adam Aleksic. If you want to use your time for reading an entire book about this and other new terms, read that book.
As I understand it was the YouTube algorithm specifically that birthed the word. As saying “killed” would get a video demonetized and lose the streamer significant revenue.
H**h, I meant.
Ah, the ol’ Scunthorpe Problem.
“Unalive” has been around for at least a couple years now. It annoys me, as well.
YouTube has algorithms for words like sex, murder, suicide, rape, etc. Monetized channels can lose their monetization for using some of those words. I’m not quite sure how all that works, in the end.
TikTok, not YouTube.
I work with a lot of young people and have heard it for the last couple years. In fact one young lady used it in conversation and even wrote up professional notes with the word.
I had to explain that it was probably best to use the more appropriate words in professional write ups as they are legal documents where I work.
Here is an especially bad Bored Panda piece. They can discuss the subjects but not use the words.
Examples:
a**sed
k**led
m**esting
s*xually transmitted
human tr**ficking
m****r
flying b**bing missions
r**ing
dr*gs
t**turer
H*******t (that one is Holocaust)
My personal favorite is ‘pew pew’ for gunfire.
I was in a Facebook rock ID group where the auto-moderator didn’t allow the word “slag”. That was often the correct answer. (I “was” in the group because the level of censorship became crippling to actually answering questions.)
Or for “gun.”
Other ones:
PDF file = pedophile
seggs = sex
corn = porn
World of Warcraft has a filter to disallow offensive names for characters. I didn’t know why Snowball was an offensive word until I looked it up. I suppose the purpose of auto-moderating certain words is to avoid the subject in the first place by flagging certain words. We all know that ones kids start talking about refining ore that it’s only a matter of time before they start trading recipes for meth. Better off banning the word slag from the get go.
I understand the euphemism treadmill is a thing. Languages evolve. I just find the use of grape instead of rape, unaliving one self instead of suicide, and other euphemisms to be particularly annoying.
or the older “pr0n”