Science has a language problem. Not a lack of it – if anything, a surfeit. But words, unlike test tubes, do not stay sterile. They evolve, mutate, and metastasise. They get borrowed, bent, misused, and misremembered. And when the public discourse gets hold of them, particularly on platforms like TikTok, it’s the language that gets top billing. The science? Second lead, if it’s lucky.
Semantic drift is at the centre of this: the gradual shift in meaning of a word or phrase over time. It’s how “literally” came to mean “figuratively,” how “organic” went from “carbon-based” to “morally superior,” and how “theory” in science means robust explanatory framework but in the public square means vague guess with no homework.
In short, semantic drift lets rhetoric masquerade as reason. Once a word acquires enough connotation, you can deploy it like a spell. No need to define your terms when the vibe will do.
When “Vitamin” No Longer Means Vitamin
Take the word vitamin. It sounds objective. Authoritative. Something codified in the genetic commandments of all living things. (reference)
But it isn’t.
A vitamin is simply a substance that an organism needs but cannot synthesise internally, and must obtain through its diet. That’s it. It’s a functional definition, not a chemical one.
So:
- Vitamin C is a vitamin for humans, but not for dogs, cats, or goats. They make their own. We lost the gene. Tough luck.
- Vitamin D, meanwhile, isn’t a vitamin at all. It’s a hormone, synthesised when sunlight hits your skin. Its vitamin status is a historical relic – named before we knew better, and now marketed too profitably to correct.
But in the land of TikTok and supplement shelves, these nuances evaporate. “Vitamin” has drifted from scientific designation to halo term – a linguistic fig leaf draped over everything from snake oil to ultraviolet-induced steroidogenesis.
The Rhetorical Sleight of Hand
This linguistic slippage is precisely what allows the rhetorical shenanigans to thrive.
In one video, a bloke claims a burger left out for 151 days neither moulds nor decays, and therefore, “nature won’t touch it.” From there, he leaps (with Olympic disregard for coherence) into talk of sugar spikes, mood swings, and “metabolic chaos.” You can almost hear the conspiratorial music rising.
The science here is, let’s be generous, circumstantial. But the language? Oh, the language is airtight.
Words like “processed,” “chemical,” and “natural” are deployed like moral verdicts, not descriptive categories. The implication isn’t argued – it’s assumed, because the semantics have been doing quiet groundwork for years. “Natural” = good. “Chemical” = bad. “Vitamin” = necessary. “Addiction” = no agency.
By the time the viewer blinks, they’re nodding along to a story told by words in costume, not facts in context.
The Linguistic Metabolism of Misunderstanding
This is why semantic drift isn’t just an academic curiosity – it’s a vector. A vector by which misinformation spreads, not through outright falsehood, but through weaponised ambiguity.
A term like “sugar crash” sounds scientific. It even maps onto a real physiological process: postprandial hypoglycaemia. But when yoked to vague claims about mood, willpower, and “chemical hijacking,” it becomes a meme with lab coat cosplay. And the science, if mentioned at all, is there merely to decorate the argument, not drive it.
That’s the crux of my forthcoming book, The Language Insufficiency Hypothesis: that our inherited languages, designed for trade, prayer, and gossip, are woefully ill-equipped for modern scientific clarity. They lag behind our knowledge, and worse, they often distort it.
Words arrive first. Definitions come limping after.
In Closing: You Are What You Consume (Linguistically)
The real problem isn’t that TikTokers get the science wrong. The problem is that they get the words right – right enough to slip past your critical filters. Rhetoric wears the lab coat. Logic gets left in the locker room.
If vitamin C is a vitamin only for some species, and vitamin D isn’t a vitamin at all, then what else are we mislabelling in the great nutritional theatre? What other linguistic zombies are still wandering the scientific lexicon?
Language may be the best tool we have, but don’t mistake it for a mirror. It’s a carnival funhouse – distorting, framing, and reflecting what we expect to see. And until we fix that, science will keep playing second fiddle to the words pretending to explain it.
