Can you tell me what an ethical dilemma is? 

Ethical dilemma. Ethical dilemma. Ethical dilemma. So far in this column, you’ve read those two words eight times. Even as I am writing this, I’m starting to forget the weight that an actual ethical dilemma carries. It doesn’t matter how scholarly or intellectual you consider yourself; anyone dissociates the actual meaning of the phrase if it’s repeated enough. 

But ethical dilemmas are important, right? The trolley problem, which has plagued moral philosophy for decades, is literally a life-or-death scenario. Yet the use of the phrase has become haphazardly casual. 

No one wants to admit it, but we like to feel smart. We like to feel above average. We use the words “ethical dilemma” because it sounds nice. It’s philosophical, provoking; it elevates us onto a pedestal to look down upon others. We don’t say it, but subconsciously we mean it. 

At first, perhaps you were describing a real ethical dilemma. But then you use it again. You like how it makes you feel. Each time you say the words “ethical dilemma” without defining it or its context, boom — it waters down. It waters down more and more until you’re on your 15th “ethical dilemma,” and its true meaning is nothing more than a leaky faucet trickling into the sink. Now, its meaning has transformed from its literal definition into a way to say “I’m better than you, because I use this big term that makes me sound like I majored in philosophy.”

It may come across as nothing more than a mild annoyance of which we become aware. Everyone knows someone who seems like they might just have no idea what they are talking about. These are the pretentious folk you brush off your shoulder, the ones you laugh with your family and friends about at the end of the day. These people don’t worry me. What worries me is the digital danger this phenomenon threatens.

The world has reached an astonishing threshold of interconnectedness, resulting in thousands, perhaps millions of public online interactions happening every single second. The best way that we, as an inherently competitive race, can distinguish ourselves from one another is through language. Suddenly, everyone is an expert. We layer words on top of one another, creating an alphabet soup of eye-catching language. And in the process, meaning is lost — not just on a level of personal conversation that you might have with a cocky co-worker during lunch break, but on an international one.

Already, I’ve observed the effects of this. Editing for my school newspaper, I’ve witnessed the word “community” be written into the same sentence three times. The Merriam-Webster dictionary doesn’t even have one uniform definition of the word community. It can be used in so many contexts to mean so many different things, and yet, we fall victim to conflation without context. 

On TikTok, the app to which I’ve developed an unfortunate addiction, I’ve witnessed the word “gaslight” climb steadily in popularity until it has become less of a serious psychological term to describe heavy manipulation and more as a way to accuse someone of petty lying. Not so slowly, but definitely surely, we are losing our capacity to have intellectual conversations, to pay respect to the words that serve us, and to think.

There is another, much more sinister reason that I think has contributed to the dilution of our vocabulary. When using words like gaslight, love bomb or the increasingly common rage bait, it attracts views, which in turn positively contributes to the algorithm. Akin to a behind-the-curtain puppeteer, digital algorithms boost posts and media that contain trending language. We’ve reached the point where language has been commodified; what were once serious terms have become a way to garner attention, money and social status. 

The next time you get stuck in a conversation with someone who employs an advanced vocabulary, I urge you to stop and ask them what the big words they love to use so much actually mean. Don’t stop there — discuss the meaning. Discuss the context in which that word is being used. Examining words themselves is how we build up more meaningful phrases, sentences, paragraphs and entire schools of thought. It just takes one word.

Ayana Ganjoo is a senior at Carlmont High School in Belmont. Student News appears in the weekend edition. You can email Student News at news@smdailyjournal.com.