Taboo is a parlour game built on evasion. Imagine I’m trying to convey the word “horse” to you, forbidden from using adjacent terms like mane or mare, stallion or stable. Clip-clop is a no-no. Neigh, an obvious nay. Tricky business, yet not impossible. When one door is locked, humans will find other approaches. Alternative words.

Eventually a horse would surface in your mind, without me having to say as much. We’d gain a point, then move to the next word: suicide, say. Of course, that word isn’t in the Taboo pack, due to its social taboos, just as the term is absent on the TikTok platform, as per guidelines. Should users dare to defy regulations they may be removed, or cop a shadow-ban.

A furtive gagging, shadow-banning sees your account lose its visibility without any notice. Put simply, your TikTok handle is placed in temporary limbo, AWOL in the “For You” pages, or the relevant hashtag streams. Persist with forbidden words, and you may see your profile vanish.

That happened for many subscribers in 2021, a virtual broom sweeping the Chinese-owned app, removing 80 million posts that breached language rules. Wising up, more users swotted the small print to help sidestep the trigger-terms. As you’d expect, sex is high risk, seeing it warp into seggs on the platform, or s3x. Just as ledollarbean is a droll evolution of lesbian’s workaround, from le$bian to le$bean to where we are now. Leg booty echoes LGBTQ, while porn transposed into corn, later swapped by the maize emoji.

As for suicide, subscribers have opted for “unalive”, or even “sewer slide”, so far averting the app’s custodians. Welcome to algospeak, the organic code born of censorship, a glossary designed to dodge the algorithm’s vigil, where a hashtag like unaliving has over 16 million views, or unaliveawareness, 3 million.

Menty-b is an offshoot, algospeak for mental breakdown. Time in rehab, no less, has been dubbed by US TikTokkers as a “grippy sock vacation”, bringing a sense of play to a deeply serious issue. Linguistically, the dialect echoes such earlier codes as rhyming slang or leetspeak – the modified spelling of 1980s bulletin boards. Yet health-wise, do all these stressy-wessy phrases run a greater risk of infantilising depression and self-harm?

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Rafi Armanto has seen both sides of the wellbeing equation. As Head of Lived Experience at Orygen, a cluster of specialist mental health services for young people, Rafi concedes this new slang may be “great in terms of stigma reduction, providing more accessible ways to discuss mental health. But it can also trivialise the understanding of mental illness”. Indeed, algospeak “can lead to people overplaying or underplaying the severity of their experience”.

Though Rafi is quick to add: “In a sense, this language only exists as a result of young people’s inability to use the usual language”. Chinese teens could mount a similar claim, where Sina Weibo, the nation’s microblogging site, has outlawed such hot-button topics as Tibet and Wuhan, occupy and falun gong. Again, the locked doors have inspired a “bypass language”, an underground glossary to convey the message.