It’s only January, but I’m ready to declare my 2025 word of the year. Creep. It’s everywhere (though true to form you may not immediately spot it). The online world is no longer merely parallel. It intersects, subsumes and fuels our real world. Siri, Alexa et al lurk.
The internet, email and, above all, apps skulk silently but persistently, stealing away our ‘free’ time. We are never off duty. Social media has crept in as our number one and sometimes only friend (though of course the parasocial relationships delude us into thinking we have many more). AI is stealthily permeating every aspect of our lives, often with huge benefits, but the imperceptibility of its advance is unnerving. Few of us really know what it is, how it works, who’s behind it, but we are all aware it’s there.
We are susceptible to creep precisely because it is creep. It’s not instantaneous; it doesn’t announce itself, allowing us the chance to accept or reject. It infiltrates, subtly, imperceptibly
The essence of creep. We are susceptible to the creep precisely because it is creep. It’s not instantaneous; it doesn’t announce itself, allowing us the chance to accept or reject. It infiltrates, subtly – or is that insidiously? Without doubt, imperceptibly, so that by the time we spot the shift – be it in our language, our outlook, a certain landscape from politics to personal appearance (nothing is immune) – it’s rooted. It’s enmeshed in our socio-cultural DNA.
A long-time devotee of linguistics, I’m inevitably drawn to the etymology of creep. It comes from the Old English word creopan which described the wriggling motion of creatures like the worm. It evolved, by the 1850s, to mean an unsettling physical sensation – the creeps – and to the later mid 20th century expression, creep out, said of something or someone who made you feel uncomfortable. A creepjoint referred to a brothel while creepers, the forerunner of the American sneakers (rubber-soled so you could creep up on someone when wearing them), endures in today’s creps. The noun, creep, to denote the person is relatively recent, only coming into use 150 years ago.
As evidenced, language is prone to creep. Nowhere more so than in the media where every voice seems intent on – forgive me – medicalising and therapising any given subject. And this vocabulary bleeds into our own. We are all ‘triggered’, have ‘social anxiety’ and are unable to deviate from our ‘scripts’. I am by no means belittling the mental health epidemic, and particularly among the young. Undeniably though, psychology has crept into our daily language so that all these terms are now in regular (mis)use.
There are other linguistic shifts afoot. In Spectator Life last month Ysenda Maxtone Graham identified the northernisation of English, the widespread creep of ‘I was sat’ and ‘I’m buzzing’. I’d add ‘lay’ rather than ‘lie’ down. And of course there’s the youth creep. Recent dictionary words of the year include ‘brain rot’, ‘rizz’ and ‘demure’, fixtures of the Gen-Z vocabulary, together with ‘literally’ (which it never is…).
Creep not only affects what you say, but how you look. Beauty writer Anita Bhagwandas’s article ‘Is this any way to treat a face?’ documents the unsettling homogenisation of A-listers’ faces to a single norm. This creeping uniformity extends beyond the face to ‘Ozempic body’, thanks to the widespread but mostly covert uptake of weight-loss drugs. The journalist Polly Vernon observed that at last year’s Christmas parties almost everyone was now skinny and that there was a correlating subtle drop in canapé consumption. It’s not just anecdotal: a recent survey by Morgan Stanley reported that 63 per cent of Ozempic users attest to eating less when dining out. Restaurants are feeling the squeeze from slimmer takings, yet the cost of eating out seems to be creeping ever upwards. When challenged on their prices, restaurateurs cite cost inflation, the epitome of creep. Money dysmorphia, a term and condition born of social media’s ‘unfettered’ access into celebrities’ curated worlds, enables us to justify our ever more expensive way of life. Lifestyle creep, you could also call it.
Creep isn’t confined to the personal domain. Global temperatures are creeping up. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was just an extension of his earlier occupation of its Crimea region – classic mission creep. And the seemingly sudden overthrow of Assad in Syria was actually a result of distraction creeping in: Putin too busy watching Ukraine, while Israel’s hostilities took the global community’s eye off the Syrian opposition. Speaking of Israel, there’s creep there too. Hamas’s heinous crimes of October 2023 have somehow merged in the collective consciousness to include Hezbollah, Israel’s nemesis on its border with Lebanon. Although Elon Musk’s latest forays into UK politics have been decisively unsubtle, there are also rumours that he may be trying to infiltrate less overtly through sport (buying Liverpool Football Club). Plus, the man is just creepy.
And that’s a big part of it – the creepiness of the creep. When I first thought about this, we had the epitome of creep in real life. Gregg Wallace – creepy in every sense. His words, his actions, his methods. Ditto Huw Edwards, the word ‘creepy’ used repeatedly to describe his text messages. And a year earlier, Russell Brand. Almost every report described him as having ‘hidden in plain sight’ – a synonym for creeping. More generally, that’s how and why that kind of man – and there are a lot of them – manages to cross lines. Their MO is the creep, the subtle and sneaky move from a mildly risqué joke (just ‘bants’) to upsetting and offensive misogyny; the apparently friendly squeeze on the back of your upper arm, inching toward your waist or lower.
There’s nothing they hate more than their creeping being called out and exposed. They rely on the shadows, and any light shone on their transgressions is met with an attempt, insidiously to wheedle out of any blame, implying that this is just ‘middle class women of a certain age’.
Everywhere you look there’s creep, creeps, creeping and creepy. It really should be the word of the year. And yet of course it won’t be, for that would undermine its very meaning.
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