'Chat' — the audience of a stream, addressed as one person: 'chat, is this real?' — which escaped the stream in 2023 and is now said by teenagers to nobody, in real life, as if they were always live. The record's entry for the audience that came with the person, and for 'chat' as a pronoun for the void.
Small fix: the peak year is right but the peak was shorter than a year — closer to six weeks. The rest of 2023 was people explaining it.
'Chat, what do I do' said aloud by a teenager in a supermarket, alone, holding two brands of pasta. The record notes chat did not answer and the teenager chose correctly.
My first sighting was 2020, in a reply from someone I have never met, and I understood it immediately. That is the closest thing to magic the internet still does.
What does it mean? Write it the way you would say it out loud.
