‘Girl dinner,’ ‘adulting,’ ‘hot girl summer’ — are all these TikTok catchphrases just infantilizing baby talk?

A few months ago, a New York Times article titled “What Is Girl Dinner?” went viral, and was widely mocked and earnestly engaged with in equal measure.

The story itself was simply documenting a preexisting trend the author had noticed on TikTok, but bringing the catchphrase and concept to a wider audience led to the mass sharing of dinner plate selfies deemed girl dinners. It almost didn’t matter what kind of food was being documented; people were just eager to add a hot new phrase to their lexicon and show it off.

The criticism wasn’t about the content or definition of girl dinner itself, which was explained to be a shorthand for the way women often eat when they find themselves home alone and “therefore can eat whatever you want for dinner, without having to consider the food preferences or nutrition needs of others.” It was described as “akin to an aesthetically pleasing Lunchable,” typically including fruit, cheese, sliced salami, a sleeve of fancy crackers and olives.

The phrase’s creator, Olivia Maher — who posted a TikTok calling attention to the type of simple, yet satisfying meals she creates for herself when her boyfriend isn’t around — was creatively expressing the contrast in how women feed themselves when a partner isn’t around, creating the expectation to prepare a full meal with a protein, vegetable and starch.

What was being poked fun at was the ridiculousness — which has become so commonplace — of attaching a special name to fairly quotidian things, or rather, taking someone’s unique phrasing or point of view and blowing it out into an over the top trend. Chris Crowley, a writer for New York Magazine’s Grub Street, drolly tweeted, “I wrote about the new trend, air breathe, where you deliberately breathe air, and the young folx pioneering it on tiktok.”

Will “taking a sleepie” become the new going to bed? Is getting married “doing a forever with your person”?

The list of other phrases that have gotten this treatment is practically an infinite scroll. There’s hot girl summer, feral girl summer, rat girl summer, adulting (baby talk for doing mundane life tasks ranging from loading the dishwasher to filing taxes), coastal grandma style, and even the frequently misused term doomscrolling, which people use as shorthand for wasting time on the internet.

Of course, husband dinner came about in response to girl dinner, and there’s a whole host of office-related terms that are practically meaningless yet popular, too, like “quiet quitting” (otherwise known as having boundaries) and the workday “dead zone.”

Does everything have to be a ‘thing’?

In Mashable, writer Meera Navlakha wrote about how a recent TikTok trend called “blueberry milk nails” — simply a popular shade of powdery, pale blue nail polish being promoted by influencers — prompted some people to say “enough” with the trend trap.

“The people speaking out against ‘blueberry milk nails’ seem to be those who are disillusioned by the promotional undertones of online buzz,” she wrote, “done with the modern trend-cycle that has shrunk from years to months; and skeptical of influencing in general.”

It’s two-fold, because it’s both the trendification of everything, but it is also the cutesy, diminutive language-ifying of everything. It’s baby talk for grownups. But why is it so popular to talk this way?

Perhaps it comes from a fear of being direct. There’s nothing wrong with these trends or enjoying them and getting excited about them. And yet there’s something almost nihilistic about the giant, sweeping current people seem to get caught up in, where they haven’t actually thought about the thing they’re consuming, catchphrasing, or ascribing to. They just know it’s popular and want to be seen consuming it, and being in on it, whatever it is.

Where does all the diminutive language and baby talk come from, though?

There’s an easy to reach for, but incorrect, conclusion one could draw (from the boomer playbook): that the millennials and Gen Z people popularizing these cutesy terms are expressing through their jargon a desire to not grow up. And after all, who could blame us with the calamities our generation is facing? But I don’t think that’s what’s going on here.

People tend to use indirect language when they’re uncertain about something. But we’re also social creatures, many of us chronically online, and it can be hard to escape the constant thrum of trend stories and posts about whatever new style you should follow or vibe you ought to inhabit. Even the fact that I’ve jokingly adopted some of these phrases to use ironically is proof positive that the marketing machine is doing its job.

Why are these microtrends and phrases so often related to ‘girl’ things?

Then again, in our current era, it’s often difficult to parse who’s being commodified and who’s doing the selling when it comes to cultural trends.

As Rebecca Jennings wrote for Vox on the girl-specific trends like “girl dinner” and “hot girl walks,” many of these mostly made up microtrends are merely marketing campaigns that repackage regular and mundane aspects of womanhood. She points out how these terms “feel slightly infantilizing and icky and like, why should 30-year-olds care what type of ‘girl’ they are?”

And yet, in her column, Jennings ultimately concludes that the women who participate in the “girlouboros” are self aware. They know that attaching the word “girl” to these names for microidentities and things that they do makes their content clickable and easy for consumption.

“They know that people will always care about what girls do,” she writes, “because girls are not yet women and therefore less easy to despise. Girls are more available for consumption, and girls have more available to them.”

What was once the provenance of marketing teams, journalists and magazine editors is now open to the public, and the women who promulgate these cultural trends are “hoping to cash in on the ineffable promise of girls yet to become women, people for whom ‘girl dinners’ and ‘hot girl walks’ contain a million possibilities — even if we know we all end up insufferable.”