At the Language of the Third Millennium XIV: The Multimodal Turn in Communication conference in Cracow, Jan Zalega presented the results of a case study on concept creep in popular online discourse. His presentation titled “Hyperfixating on movies and trauma dumping on dates: An exploratory study of concept creep on popular lifestyle and news websites” addressed the following research questions: How are clinical terms used on lifestyle websites? How does such usage modify the original meaning of the terms?

The aim of the study was to explore how medical and harm-related terminology, terms most susceptible to concept creep, function in the digital environment. The dataset consisted of 30 news and lifestyle articles published between 2020 and 2025 on the following websites: buzzfeed.com, cosmopolitan.com, and vox.com. The analysis focused on how the terms are understood, how they are used outside their original medical context, and the possible new contexts of their use in online discourse.

The results pointed to the process of semantic bleaching of the terminology. Terms were used in contexts that differed greatly from their original uses. At the same time, these terms retained some aspects of their original definitions. For example, while the term ‘trauma‘ in online contexts may lack critical components such as “exposure to actual or threatened death, serious injury, or sexual violence,” it still preserves the element of psychological distress. This aligns with the theory of concept creep, which extends a concept to include less severe cases.