We need to become more conscious of where our language comes from, because what we choose to say and what we refuse to say both help define who we are. Internet slang is rarely neutral: words move through communities, carry assumptions with them, and often reach us after their original context has been stripped away. Some language comes from ordinary cultural creativity, Black internet culture, queer communities, fandoms, gaming, TikTok, Tumblr, Twitch, and countless smaller spaces, and some of that language gets appropriated so heavily that people use it while forgetting the communities that created it. Other language comes from reactionary internet cultures such as 4chan, the manosphere, incel spaces, blackpill communities, and the online far right, where terms like “soy,” “cuck,” “NPC,” “degenerate,” “based,” “-pilled,” and “-slop” developed within cultures obsessed with hierarchy, humiliation, masculinity, superiority, and contempt; even “slop” is worth examining alongside older reactionary constructions such as “goyslop.” The point is not to obsess over purity, but to understand that words can carry stereotypes, political assumptions, misogyny, racism, antisemitism, class contempt, queerphobia, or dehumanizing ideas even after they become ordinary memes. Sociology teaches us that we are shaped by the social worlds around us, and language is one of the clearest ways that happens. We should know what we are saying, why we are saying it, who taught us to say it, and whether the assumptions inside that language actually represent us. We should also pay attention to appropriation, because mainstream internet culture constantly takes language from marginalized communities, strips away its history, and treats it as generic slang while the people who created it are ignored or mocked for speaking the same way. Checking our lexicon is therefore part of checking ourselves: if we recognize harmful stereotypes, reactionary ideas, or appropriated language in the way we speak, we can choose better words instead of letting someone else’s culture, prejudice, or ideology speak through us.