A to Z of TikTok

Know your deds from your seggs to avoid seeming cheugy on the social media platform

- By Nicola Whitfield

IT CAN be hard to keep up if you aren’t a member of Generation Z. You can try, but there’s a lot going on in the rapidly changing world of social media.

There we were, thinking we were doing well. We got into Facebook. Then Instagram came along and we got into that too. And the stories! And the reels!

We scrolled, we posted, we commented, we emojied – we did all the things and felt pretty good about it.

Then TikTok arrived and it seemed like a good bit of fun too. We danced a little and lip-synced to songs and thought we were kind of cool.

But we weren’t. We aren’t. We never will be.

Zoomers rule the virtual world and we don’t have a hope in hell of keeping up. They even have their own TikTok language, for crying-face emoji’s sake.

Still, we can give it a go. And so here, in the spirit

of kindness Gen Zers are unlikely to display to anyone born before 1996, is the quintessential A-Z (well, almost) of TikTok speak.

A is for Algospeak. The term given to the slang used by content creators to get around bans on certain words and phrases. The monitoring of content via TikTok’s algorithm means users can be kicked out if they use words regarded as triggering, unsafe, rude or sexual. A is also for Abow, which is similar to wow, damn or OMG. Used to express shock, horror, disbelief.