Sometimes a particular word may trend on TikTok, mostly because it’s so rare and absurd to feature in anything viral. It started with content creator Jools Lebron, being @joolieannie. And finally, she verbalized the now-iconic phrase “Very demure, very mindful.”.
People embraced this phrase by doing so through humor. Using a persona that exaggerates one’s own “demure” tendencies in horribly mundane contexts. For example, a person jokes about how they look “demure” while eating a blooming onion at Outback Steakhouse
This fad speaks to the popularity of even the most arcane words on TikTok. The audio-visual format helps words be funny and interesting. Unlike in text-based platforms, simple words become viral phenomena when they are put within TikTok’s sound and visual formula, simple words become viral phenomena here.
TikTok’s control over language reflects the way in-groups cook up and spread their buzzwords. Any in-group of friends that we can think of has their jokes, similarly, TikTok users tend to create trends around specific words. So “demure” becomes part of a now widely shared vocabulary by people in internet culture.
All in all, “Very demure” is a token of what TikTok is contributing to language. The idiopathic nature of the medium lends its power to some extremely rare words as a focus of a viral trend. Users socialize with these trends as they help in shaping and polishing our everyday language.
