The Word That Became Its Own Example

A few years ago, the internet handed us a new way to feel old. The word was cheugy, pronounced CHOO-ghee, and it described anything that had once been fashionable but was now hopelessly behind the times: the inspirational quote on the kitchen wall, the skinny jeans, the boss who still signs off emails with a winking emoji.

The important part was the “once”. Something couldn’t be cheugy unless it had been cool first. Cheugy wasn’t the opposite of trendy so much as trendy’s sad afterlife.

The word was reportedly coined around 2013 by a Los Angeles high-school student, Gaby Rasson, who needed a word for that particular kind of trying-too-hard. It drifted around quietly for years, picked up an Urban Dictionary entry, and then exploded on TikTok in 2021, when it seemed for a few months as if everyone was either labelling things cheugy or panicking that they were.

And then, with a neatness you rarely see in language, the word became its own best example. The more widely it spread, the more it was used by exactly the sort of people it described: parents, brands and anyone trying a bit too hard to sound current. By the time it reached the corporate social media accounts, it was finished. Saying “cheugy” in 2026 is, unavoidably, cheugy.

This is the normal life cycle of slang, just sped up. A word starts inside a small group, where it signals that you belong. It spreads, because it’s useful or funny or both. Then it reaches the people the group was defining itself against, and the moment it does, it stops doing its job. The word still means the same thing; it just doesn’t mark you as an insider any more. So the group moves on to something new, and the old word is left with the rest of us.

Brands are particularly good at speeding up this process. When a fast-food chain tweets that its pancakes are “on fleek”, or a bank’s marketing team describes a savings account as having “rizz”, the word is effectively being read its last rites. Dictionaries are only slightly slower. When “rizz” was named Oxford’s Word of the Year in 2023, a good number of teenagers quietly stopped using it.

There’s a lesson in that for anyone communicating on behalf of an organisation. Borrowing the language of a group you’re not part of rarely makes you sound like one of them. It usually makes you sound like someone trying to, which is the one thing the slang was invented to detect.

If you want to sound current, the safer approach is much less exciting. Speak plainly, in your own voice, about things your audience actually cares about. Plain language never goes out of fashion, mainly because it was never in fashion to begin with.

And if you’ve just realised you’re a cheug, take comfort. So is the word.