Wordwatch: Instagrammable

“Instagrammable” — the word crops up in an online news headline (February, 2022), about an ordinary terrace house in Manchester that has been imaginatively decorated by its owners, then photographed and circulated via social media. 

The word is obviously new-minted, derived from the name of the social media site Instagram, which is of course an invented proprietary appellation. Its website calls it a “simple, fun and creative way to capture, edit and share photos, videos and messages with friends and family”. It’s one of several such facilities and as I’m not a subscriber to any of them and barely understand how they work I shan’t offer to judge between them. 

They are clearly changing the way we think about ourselves and the relations we have with others. We have become familiar with the notion of people taking photographs of their food and sharing them with friends. The leading factor in all this is the gratuitousness of it. I wouldn’t say that you aren’t justified in telling your friends about your glamorous new home, but is there any need to photograph your plate of spaghetti, let alone show it to other people? It’s a classic illustration of the principle that if something is technically possible it will be done, however unnecessary.  

With the proliferation of technical means, this gratuitousness is becoming an increasingly prevalent aspect of modern life. My pet example (and please forgive the digression) is the appalling shrieking and wailing inflicted on us all by the sirens of police cars, fire engines and ambulances. These are especially irritating because they create a problem just where that problem importantly shouldn’t exist: they are very hard to locate. The system they replaced was in practice very much superior: the old fire engines had a large brass bell, rung by hand with a rope, which was audible everywhere, and always easily locatable so that you knew how to get out of the vehicle’s way. It was no torture for the eardrums either, but actually, though loud, a rather mellow and beautiful sound. But because an electronic siren is technologically more “advanced”, it is used despite its huge inferiority in practical terms. Public discourse is reduced to the level of an infant throwing a tantrum. 

So I have little hope of seeing the speedy demise of social media. They have their uses, of course, but many are bad for us in one way or another. We forget that life went on perfectly acceptably (and in many ways more agreeably) before they were invented and things could be “instagrammable”. 

Since they have become fixtures in modern life, their names are now embedded in our vocabulary, and words derived from those names will proliferate. “Instagrammable” is merely an example, driven in this case, and quite typically, by the urgent journalistic need to combine concision with punch.

“Instagram” itself is a good example of this need for compression. It was developed in America in 2010 but was quickly snapped up by another social media company, Facebook. New products need names, and those names must, for the good of the product, be memorable and encapsulate various ideas. Compared with “Facebook” itself, or another well-known name, “WhatsApp” for instance, “Instagram” is easily understood and suggests both speed — “instant” — and a handy form of communication, as in “telegram”.   

So the name introduces a possibly useful group of ideas in a memorable form. What’s happened now is that it has become the stem of an adjective, “instagrammable”, denoting the capacity of an object or event to be “captured, edited and shared” by means of the “media” in question. “Media” itself, of course, has for a long time been used as a singular noun, in place of “medium”. 

 There’s also another noun, “Instagrammer” — a user of Instagram. I have no doubt it is already also a verb — as in “I instagrammed my dinner”. Note that there can be doubt as to whether the website’s name is always capitalised: it is on the way to becoming a regular part of English vocabulary. Of course, it may equally disappear without a trace in the course of a few months or years.  Any word admitted to our liberal, ever-expanding language can expect the same treatment. And we must accept the onrush of the technologically advanced, or lump it.