Internet slang isn't real English

What actually happened

The specific words are a tour of the internet's language factory. 'Skibidi', from the absurdist YouTube series Skibidi Toilet, functions as 'cool', 'bad', or pure filler depending on delivery. 'Delulu', clipped from 'delusional' in fan communities around 2014, took a decade to travel from stan Twitter to the dictionary. 'Tradwife' names a social-media aesthetic of performed 1950s domesticity. None of these were coined by a writer; all of them were coined by the feed.

The process behind the entries is the same corpus-driven lexicography that admitted 'google' as a verb in 2006, but the pipeline has visibly accelerated. Dictionary editors now watch internet usage directly, and the time from a word's emergence in a subculture to its formal codification has collapsed from generations to years. Cambridge's own announcement made the criterion explicit: internet culture is changing English, and the words that demonstrate endurance get recorded, whatever a teacher thinks of them.

The deeper revision is to the claim's premise. 'Real English' has only ever meant English that enough people use for long enough, and every generation's slang has faced the same sneer on its way into the record: 'OK' was a jokey 1839 abbreviation, 'teenager' was marketing jargon, 'quiz' was slang. The internet did not lower the bar for entry. It raised the speed at which words can clear it.