Somewhere in a conversation you weren't part of, someone's spouse asked a linguist a question so obvious it took months to surface: why is everyone suddenly saying *alongside*? Ben Yagoda picked up the thread, Lynne Murphy had already tugged it, and here we are, watching a preposition slither sideways into every sentence that used to make do with "with" or "beside." It's the kind of question that makes you feel like you've just noticed a new scar on your own hand. You didn't see it happen. You can't remember when it got there. But now you can't stop staring.
And that's the fun of it, isn't it? The word *alongside* isn't new. It's been loitering in English since the 1700s, content to be a literal spatial marker, a ship pulling up next to a dock. But somewhere in the last decade it got ambitious. It started showing up in corporate emails, podcast intros, and Substack manifestos, not as a geographic pointer but as a vague gesture at collaboration, proximity, or just the *vibe* of being near something. It's a word that wants to say "I'm with you" without committing to the grammar of it. And that's exactly why it's spreading. It's soft, it's flexible, and it lets you sound like you're including someone while actually just adding a layer of polish to a sentence that didn't need it.
Here's where we get spooty, because this is the razor clam we've been digging for. The rise of *alongside* isn't really about the word. It's about how we talk about talking. We're all so desperate to sound collaborative, to signal that we're not alone in the room, that we've started reaching for prepositions that do the emotional heavy lifting that verbs used to do. It's the same impulse that makes people say "circling back" when they mean "coming back" and "reaching out" when they mean "emailing." We're not witnessing a linguistic shift so much as a collective tic, a nervous habit of adding one extra syllable to everything so it feels more official. And sure, language changes, always has, always will. That's not the problem. The problem is when we start confusing the *feeling* of saying something with the *act* of saying it. Which is why we loved Still You, Just With More Vocabulary: Why Language Doesn't Change Who We Are and why we'd push it across the table at anyone who thinks a thesaurus is a personality. Because no, swapping out a few words doesn't make you a different person. But it does tell us something about what you're trying to signal, and that's worth paying attention to.
So what do we tell the friend who asked the question? We tell them to relax, then we tell them to listen. The *alongside* explosion is a litmus test for how we're all feeling about connection in an age that's simultaneously hyper-connected and lonelier than a hermit crab in a shoebox. It's not a conspiracy. It's not even a fad, not really. It's just a word that finally found its moment, the way A Name Emerges: Family, Memory, and the Secrets We Bury finds its own buried truths in the gaps between what we say and what we mean. And if you're worried that your own speech is getting cluttered with prepositions that don't pull their weight, here's the concrete takeaway you can actually use: next time you're about to say *alongside*, pause. Ask yourself what you're really trying to say. If the answer is "with," say "with." If the answer is "in addition to," say that. And if the answer is "I don't know, it just sounds better," then you've just found the razor clam, my friend. You've found it. Now watch it slip away the moment you try to grab it. That's the whole trick, and it's why we're still talking about a four-syllable conjunction that refuses to sit still. Watch the next time you hear it. You won't be able to unhear it. And honestly? That's the point.
