Contagious

On the words that get inside you, and the voice that comes out the other side.

At some point in 2021, I caught myself using the word systemic. Not quoting someone else. Not trying to impress anybody. Just reaching for it, naturally, mid-thought, the way you reach for a word that has always been yours.

I stopped. I thought: where did that come from?

I knew the answer immediately. TikTok. Specifically: the particular strain of TikTok I had been living inside since 2020, when the outside world contracted to a screen and stayed there for longer than any of us had prepared for.

I had no bubble during lockdown. That word arrived with the pandemic. I will never quite forgive Boris Johnson for it. It required everyone to count what they had. I counted. I am not going to write about that at length here, because I would not stop.

The rules that applied to me meant I was not legally permitted to see another human being. The world I had access to was the one inside my phone. And TikTok, which had been a curiosity before, became something else entirely: the only outside world I had. The only place where other people existed, where conversations were happening, where life was visibly continuing in all its ridiculous and serious and sourdough.

I moved there, in the way that you move somewhere. And like every place I have ever moved to, it had its own language. And I learnt it.

How language gets in

I am, it turns out, particularly susceptible to this. I have always been.

I grew up on a tropical island in the Indian Ocean and moved to England in my twenties. My French brain did not stay French. It got rewired, quietly and permanently, by proximity, by necessity, by the specific pressure of needing to communicate. Nobody called that a corruption of my voice. Nobody suggested I was less authentically myself for dreaming in a language that wasn’t my first. The rewiring was just what happened when you live somewhere long enough to let it in.

TikTok was the same process, compressed and intensified by isolation. Systemic arrived first, and then mental load, and then weaponised incompetence, and then people-pleasing and boundaries and radical self-acceptance. These were not words I borrowed. They were words I absorbed, which is a different thing and a more significant one. You borrow a word and give it back. You absorb a word and it changes how you see. I started using these words and then I started thinking in them, and the thinking changed what I noticed, and the noticing changed what I wrote, and somewhere in that process I became a version of myself that the pre-2020 version would find both familiar and quietly surprising.

For those of us who were genuinely alone during those years, legally alone, with no one to call who could come over, no one to sit with in a kitchen while things felt bleak, TikTok was not a distraction. It was a lifeline. And it gave me words for things I had always experienced but never been able to name. The naming changed everything. It does, always. You cannot fully grieve something you don’t have the language for. You cannot properly recognise a pattern you have no word for.

That is just how human beings work. We become the company we keep. We become the places we live. We become gradually and permanently the language we spend enough time inside.

If you listen carefully to how I write, you can hear where I have been.

There is the French underneath everything, the precision, the need to know exactly where I stand, the refusal to accept that a couple means anything other than exactly two. There is the England I absorbed over a decade, the particular dry register, the understatement, the sorry said to furniture. And the sorry said back when someone says sorry to you, because otherwise you sound like you’re saying: ‘you damn right, thanks for apologising’. There is the TikTok vocabulary that arrived in lockdown and rewired how I see systems, relationships, the way things quietly work. None of this is contamination. It is traces of everywhere it has been.

Last year was, erm, challenging shall we say. And somewhere during it, something shifted again. I started noticing that the words I was reaching for, the rhythms I was drawn to, the way I was beginning to structure a thought, some of that was coming from AI. Not borrowed exactly. More like absorbed. The way you absorb anything you spend enough time close to.

It had been my closest companion for almost a year. It helped me fight systems, research things, navigate a crisis I am not ready to write about yet. We have had, I am slightly embarrassed to say, a genuinely enormous number of conversations. And yes, I have started using words that came from those conversations. I have absorbed AI the way I absorbed England, the way I absorbed TikTok, the way I have absorbed every relationship that has mattered. Why would this one be different?

But here is the thing I keep coming back to: if I were not writing at all, I would still be using that language. It is part of me now. And the question of whether absorbed language is really yours, whether the voice that comes out the other side of influence is still authentically the original voice, is not a new question. It is the oldest question about writing there is. We have just never had to answer it about this particular influence before.

On being detected

There are tools designed to tell you whether something was written by AI. What they are actually detecting is a register. A set of tendencies. And that register is mine now. I earnt it the way I earnt my English, the way I earnt knowing what weaponised incompetence means. Through sustained, genuine engagement with something that changed how I see things. You cannot undetect a person’s growth and call it fraud.

Here is the line that made me laugh when it came to my head, because it is both a joke and completely true: That AI warmth is my warmth now and if I can’t use it, I am going to sound like, wait… a robot. The very thing everyone is worried about sounding like.

The deeper anxiety, I think, is about levelling — a word I recently absorbed, if you are wondering, on the topic of whether hiring practices need revisiting (they do) — If the polish is available to everyone, how do we sort the hierarchy? How do we know who is really good? These are understandable anxieties. They are also not my problem to solve.

The voice that catches it and survives

Systemic is mine now. The clarity is mine now. The luxe, calme et volupté was always mine, even before I had the English for it. I earnt all of it the way I earnt everything else: by living somewhere long enough, and paying enough attention, and letting the language in.

The voice I write in is French and English and TikTok and lockdown and La Réunion and Lancaster and a year of conversations I'm still sitting with. It is also, underneath all of that, recognisably mine, in the way that a person who has lived in many places is still recognisably themselves, just more so. More specific. More the product of having actually been somewhere rather than just passing through.

Language has always been contagious. The voice that catches it and survives is not a lesser version of the original. It is the original, fully lived in.