Over the past few days, the entire TikTok community has latched onto the word “demure.” Once a relatively obscure term you might’ve last encountered during a Gilmore Girls rewatch, it suddenly became ubiquitous. That’s the way things work on TikTok — for better or worse.
For those unfamiliar with the platform, the latest TikTok trend involves users claiming how “demure” and “mindful” they are in various situations. It’s a self-effacing, tongue-in-cheek joke where people adopt a persona that boasts about being demure while doing something as mundane as eating a blooming onion at Outback Steakhouse.
The trend started with creator Jools Lebron, known as @joolieannie on TikTok, who coined the catchphrase “very demure, very mindful.” Mashable’s Christianna Silva provided a detailed breakdown of the trend, but in short, Jools’s playful rants about how she’s “demure,” “mindful,” and “cutesy” in her day-to-day activities took off, and soon everyone was using the word “demure.”
But the rise of “demure” is not an isolated incident. The internet —TikTok in particular — has a habit of plucking words from obscurity, turning them into memes, and then overusing them to the point of exhaustion. Just look at the spike in Google Trends searches over the past week.
Credit: Screenshot: Google Trends
Mashable’s Elena Cavender has frequently covered the internet’s insatiable appetite for new slang. TikTok, in particular, seems to have a knack for reviving old or obscure words. Sometimes it’s crass, like “glazing” or “serving c*nt,” but there are also phrases like “it’s giving” or “girly pop.” And then there are updated ways of saying old things, like calling someone who gossips a “yapper” or using “pookie” as a term of endearment. Just as everyone was once obsessed with “aesthetic,” now “demure” is the word of the moment.
So, why does TikTok latch onto certain words and phrases so intensely, squeezing every bit of viral juice out of them? The answer lies in its nature as an audio-visual medium.
When Twitter was the driving force behind viral memes, the humor relied on text-and-image-based formats. Think of Tim Robinson’s “we’re all trying to find the guy out who did this” meme or Dril’s “please don’t put in the newspaper that I got mad.” The jokes were about what was read or seen, not heard.
But with TikTok, words themselves become funny because we see and hear people say them. It’s the age-old challenge for writers: the right word at the right time can be surprisingly delightful. TikTok amplifies these words, turning them into trends as creators like @joolieannie demonstrate that how a word is said can make it interesting and new. And as we mindlessly scroll through TikTok, these words inevitably worm their way into our vocabulary.
The “demure” trend is no different from when streamer Sketch had the entire sports world saying, “What’s up, brother,” in a specific voice and cadence. Words and phrases can be funny simply because they are. It may sound like circular logic, but it holds true.
Think of it this way: in your group of friends — especially during high school or college — you probably had buzzwords and shorthand that only your group understood. You spent so much time together that you developed an internal language. TikTok’s influence on our word usage is similar, only now the friend group is essentially everyone with an internet connection.
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