Over the past two weeks, Julian Kevon Glover, assistant professor of gender sexuality and women’s studies and dance and choreography at Virginia Commonwealth University, has been baffled by the amount of people around her adopting the word “demure”. “I wondered, where on god’s green earth did you get such a word?” she says.

As someone who doesn’t have TikTok, Glover hadn’t seen creator Jools Lebron’s “very demure, very mindful” videos. Lebron has been using the word on the app since August 2, when she shared a tip for getting rid of a white makeup moustache and schooled her followers on how to be demure at work. Since then, the word has exploded exponentially. Lebron herself has multiple how-to videos on being demure at the strip club or keeping your hair at a demure length, people are making demure edits of Kamala Harris, and brands like Ssense are already using the word in their social media marketing. There’s been “demured”, “demurity”, “demuretsey” and even “demure-gate”, when another creator Selyna Brillare claimed she used the word previously in now-deleted videos. It begs the question, can anyone actually own a buzzword?

Glover says the word “demure” has been part of the ballroom scene for as long as she can remember. “It has very clear connections to the politics of passing,” she says. “It would always be used in reference to someone who wants to articulate a feminine embodiment, and that feminine connotation reflects the white Western way of understanding the world that is still present in ballroom.” Through her satirical videos,  Lebron is flipping the term on its head. She’s also credited the “many demure divas” who have “paved the way” for her, including Selyna Brillare, Devin Halbal, and ballroom icon Venus Xtravaganza. But, once brands hop on the demure train, Glover says the pattern of the internet taking ballroom terms and stripping them of their meaning continues (think “mother” or “death drop”). “It’s a cycle where we rely on the words of the community while excluding them from the conversation by lifting the meaning or shifting the context,” she says. “And it was precisely a term that reflected people’s desires to fit in and be undetectable.” 

Even for linguists, it can be near impossible to call what words will blow up each year (who could have predicted “raw-dogging a flight”) and, according to Nicole Holliday, associate professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, the popularity of a buzzword all comes down to repetition. “We’re hearing tens of thousands of words a day, and the vast majority are very regular; we don’t notice them,” she says. “Demure sticks out because it’s still not a very big proportion of what we're hearing, and the algorithm is siloing us.” As with most internet buzzwords, demure may infiltrate some of our lexicons for a short period, but Holliday says that new phrases are being abandoned as fast as they are being adopted. “It’s like the internet is one giant high school,” she says. “In high school, there was a sense that everyone was saying one word that nobody else in another school was saying for a month, and then it was gone, and nobody ever said that again.” 

TikTok may be one giant high school, but it’s also an infinite loop. With “demure”, not only are we continuing to cycle through ballroom phrases (that often go uncredited), but we’re also repeating a seasonal pattern. The popularity of the word has left people already calling for a “demure fall”, after a “Brat summer”. This, says Holliday, is the same thing as hot girl summer leading into Christian girl fall in 2019, where we (shockingly) wanted to be outside for summer and channel a more modest energy for the cooler months. “We have these ways in which words become seasonal and reflect a moment where we feel the need to have a correction or backlash against the last thing,” she says. In other words, we’re stuck in a high school-like state, repeatedly laughing at the same joke with different phrasing. (Not very demure or mindful, perhaps.)