"I'm so tired of all the bad news on birdsite."

"Yeah, there's just too much about The Cheeto."

Cheeto and birdsite might not be common vocabulary, but the phrases are strangely interpretable. It's easy to jump from Cheeto to Donald Trump or from birdsite to Twitter. Even more understandable is the attitude that comes along for the ride: Somehow it's clear that someone who uses ornate synonyms isn't happy about either entity.

But how is it that we're so quick to figure out the hidden meanings of these words? And what does it mean for communication in the internet age that we're increasingly drawn to elaborate synonyms?

Gretchen McCulloch is WIRED's Resident Linguist. She's the cocreator of Lingthusiasm, a podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics, and her book Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language is coming out in July 2019 from Penguin.

A recent paper by researcher Emily van der Nagel puts a name to this phenomenon of hiding a word in plain sight. She calls it Voldemorting. Van der Nagel traces Voldemorting back to the Harry Potter books, where most characters are too afraid of Voldemort to say the word directly, instead replacing his name with euphemisms like You Know Who and He Who Must Not Be Named. This practice starts as a superstition, but by the final book there’s a deeper purpose: The word Voldemort is revealed as a way of locating the resistance: “Using his name breaks protective enchantments, it causes some kind of magical disturbance.”

The internet practice of Voldemorting, van der Nagel says, comes via a comment left by a user named Eugene, who made the connection as part of a discussion about deliberately starving "trash celebrities" of attention by not referring to them by name.

Voldemorting: The act of never speaking the name of someone truly terrible. E.g. ‘Don’t bother sending me those links, I’m Voldemorting those losers!’

On the internet there's no such thing as a tracing spell, but there's something almost as effective: search algorithms. Plugging a distinctive name into a search box lets us track mentions around the web. I could set up a Google Alert to email me every time a website mentions my name, or simply do a periodic Twitter search for myself or my favorite celebrity, so I can ride to my or their defense if someone says something negative.

I mean, I don't. But plenty of people do.

Yet Voldemorting departs from the Harry Potter analogy in one crucial way. You Know Who and He Who Must Not Be Named are a small set of ominous phrases, while internet Voldemorting is often playful and cycles through infinite variations of newly coined words. That includes single words for social media sites (birdhell, birbsite, birdworld, faceborg) and elaborate phrases like those found in the Detrumpify browser extension (Manchurian Combover, Empty Popcorn Bag Rotting in the Sun). In the books, Dumbledore says, "Fear of a name increases fear of the thing itself." Van der Nagel counters: "On social media, Voldemorting has the potential to invert this power play."

On the internet there's no such thing as a tracing spell, but there's something almost as effective: search algorithms.

Rather than just extracting one taboo word and replacing it with another, online Voldemorts spread and mutate into dozens, even hundreds, of potential synonyms. (I coined faceblue while reporting on the phenomenon, and respondents immediately and correctly interpreted it as standing in for Facebook.) These variations make for effective Voldemorting: Slightly different words make it difficult to find any particular one through search. While search engine optimization uses keywords and hashtags in a competition to make your post or website the most relevant, Voldemorting is the anti-SEO, the anti-keyword, and the anti-hashtag. It transforms your subject from a single mass into an ungraspable swarm.

It’s easy to see why internet-ers have resorted to this strategy. If you complain about an airline on social media, even if you don't directly @mention them, odds are fairly good you'll get a reply from a perkily beleaguered social media manager tasked with searching for mentions of the brand and proactively replying to complaints. On the sketchier side, if you complain about something benign—like how much work you have to do—you may get offers from dubious productivity tools or even paid homework "help."

(In perhaps the most ironic example of Voldemorting, I once tweeted the word Voldemort itself and my tweet was liked by two separate parody Voldemort accounts, presumably hoping to juice their follower count through a little social media Dark Arts.)

Once you've been burned by these nefarious techniques, you might start hiding your keywords—preemptively adding asterisks or replacing the words altogether by Voldemorting.

Once you've been burned by these nefarious techniques, you might start hiding your keywords—preemptively adding asterisks or replacing the words altogether by Voldemorting.