Science1 publisher2 min readPublished
A UNSW linguist traces TikTok's "it's giving" to two deleted words
Cathy Xu's study of "it's giving" documents an ordinary verb taking complements it never used to take, and users who police the new pattern without a rulebook. She said in an interview that new usage now spreads in a couple of years.
The Scientist · Science desk
What happened
- Cathy Xu, a researcher in UNSW Sydney's School of Humanities & Languages, is studying how TikTok users play with language and how new forms spread through the platform.
- She traces "it's giving" to expressions such as "giving off a certain vibe", with users first dropping "off" and then "vibe" until the verb carried the meaning by itself.
- Food words have shifted too, with "ate" now able to mean that someone did something particularly well and "serving" used to praise a look or an attitude.
Compiled by The ScientistSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- constraint Xu's comparison is about how quickly a usage arrives in everyday speech. Arrival speed and obsolescence speed are separate measurements, so this work cannot tell a style guide or a caption library how long any of these forms will stay current.
- exposure Voice flips the polarity of "cook": "you cooked" is praise and "you're cooked" is ruin. A sentiment or moderation filter keyed to the word alone scores the two identically.
- decision A brand or writer borrowing "it's giving" is accepting an unwritten constraint that other users enforce in public, since they reject the phrase when it merely describes what is happening instead of drawing an analogy.
"Giving off a certain vibe" loses two words and becomes "it's giving": drop "off", then drop "vibe" [1]. What is left is a verb carrying the meaning the noun used to carry, so the phrase now means something close to "it resembles" or "it has the feel of" without any of those words appearing [16]. "It has its own very sophisticated kind of syntactic structure," Xu said [5]. The change shows up in the complement. "Give" takes noun-shaped adjectival phrases such as "she's giving equestrian", and sometimes a whole clause, as in "it's giving someone's been hitting the gym" [2].
"TikTok is accelerating language change because it used to take decades for new phrases and expressions to move into everyday use, but now you can see it happen in a couple of years," Xu said [3]. Take "decades" as twenty years and "a couple" as two, and the implied speed-up is about tenfold [13]. Both of those words are vague, and reading them this way is not a measurement. The report on her research does not date the first attestation of "it's giving", and it gives neither a count of the videos she examined nor a sample size [14].
The corrections tell you more. Xu found users correcting each other when the phrase was used incorrectly, including one who complained that a reality television program had overused it and others who said it works best when it creates an analogy instead of simply describing what is happening [6]. A correction is evidence of a constraint speakers can apply without being able to state it. "There are no explicit grammar rules or rulebook on this new variety of English on TikTok," Xu said. "But everybody just knows what's right, what's wrong, how you should use it" [7].
Xu points to the platform itself as the channel. TikTok has 1.59 billion monthly users [8], and its default For You Page plays videos without a user having to select anything, so a video can reach a large audience within hours [9]. That describes exposure, and the research as reported follows one expression that spread. Without a set of expressions that did not spread, exposure cannot be separated from whatever made speakers adopt this one. Xu says "it's giving" is now used in podcasts, comedy and television, and in everyday conversation, especially among younger people [10].
What to watch
- Publication of Xu's study with first-attestation dates and video counts, which would make the two-year diffusion claim testable.
- Whether the analogy constraint users enforce in comment threads holds, or whether "it's giving" loosens into plain description.
- Whether scripted television and podcast writing keep the usage once it stops being new on the platform.