The Guardian coins 18 new words for our tech hellscape, from 'dickover' to 'AI-horning'
nordicinst · x · 2026-08-18
The Guardian rounds up new coinages for modern tech irritants. The centerpiece, dickover — coined by tech writer John Gruber in May — describes a modal/popover that deliberately obscures a site's own content: cookie banners, notification prompts, sign-in walls.
The piece also proposes AI-horning: AI features shoehorned into everything, from AI overviews before search results to Spotify's AI DJ. The author laments that after their car switched from Google Assistant to Gemini, navigation got noticeably worse. 18 words in total map the 2026 tech hellscape.
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