FEATURED NEOLOGISM:

One of my favourite recent neologisms is doomscrolling (or alternatively “doomsurfing”), a term coined in English that captures a distinctly modern digital behaviour. It blends the words doom (meaning catastrophe, despair, or bad news) and scrolling (the act of moving through content on a screen). Structurally, it combines noun(s) and a gerund (compounding + affixation) to describe the compulsive act of endlessly scrolling through negative news or social media posts, even when it causes distress.

The word began circulating widely around 2020, during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, when many people found themselves obsessively consuming grim updates online. It gained prominence as global anxiety and screen time surged. It is a powerful example of how language evolves to name new psychological and/or social phenomena emerging from our digital habits and lifestyle changes. For users, it is a concise, vivid, and instantly relatable addition to the English lexicon.

I am an Associate Professor of Linguistics at METU, Ankara-Türkiye, where I lead the Discourse and Corpus Research Group (DISCORE: https://discore.metu.edu.tr/). My work brings together corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, and socio-pragmatics research, with a strong focus on how linguistic and social practices shape each other and problematization of research methodologies and synergies. With my research team, we have developed several large-scale spoken corpora, including the Spoken Turkish Corpus (STC), the Corpus of Turkish Youth Language (CoTY), the Turkish Social Media Influencer Corpus (SMIC), English-Medium Instruction Corpus (EMIC). We are currently in the early days of planning and compiling a new national corpus partnering with The Turkish Language Association (TDK). With colleagues, I have previously explored many lexical and pragmatic aspects of interaction including lexical innovation (how speakers adapt, coin, or reframe expressions) and relatedly language alternation practices across academic, youth, and online contexts. I am also coordinating the development of an EMI faculty development program, linking corpus-based insights to pedagogical practice which is a site where interesting alternation practices and disciplinary (terminological) lexical innovation is also present. For more please visit my profile.