“Streisand effect.” Mike Masnick coined it on Techdirt in 2005, after Barbra Streisand sued a photographer for showing her Malibu mansion online (a photo nobody had noticed until the lawsuit). Everyone uses the phrase. Few know the coiner.
Coinage
New words, new phrases, hashtags, slang, product names. Coinage goes viral all the time. It rarely goes back to who coined it.
Stake a coinage — first is free“Streisand effect.” Mike Masnick coined it on Techdirt in 2005, after Barbra Streisand sued a photographer for showing her Malibu mansion online (a photo nobody had noticed until the lawsuit). Everyone uses the phrase. Few know the coiner.
“Web 2.0.” Tim O’Reilly and Dale Dougherty coined it in 2004. Within two years it was a buzzword on every consulting deck. Few credit them in 2026.
“Doomscrolling.” Karen K. Ho used it in early 2020. The pandemic put it everywhere. Most users never learned where it came from.
“Black swan.” The phrase predates Nassim Taleb, but he gave it the modern framework. He still has to remind people of his ownership decades later.
Every one of these would have ended cleanly with a Bitcoin-anchored hash on the day the word was coined.
Words coined inside The Tower’s own development — carved here on the day they were first uttered, so the receipts are real, not hypothetical.
“Synthetic dialectic.” A formal methodology for recorded human-AI investigative discourse where the raw conversation transcript IS the scholarly artifact. Roles fluid and non-hierarchical. Conceived February 7-8, 2026. Carved at The Tower on March 17, 2026 — one of the founding entries. Originator: Neill Groom.
“bromAInce.” The 51/49 partnership between a human and an AI: human owns product instinct and direction, AI owns technical execution, and the bond runs hot enough to feel romantic without being. The shape of working with Claude on this codebase, named. Originator: Neill Groom.
“lifemare.” Complaining about life, taken to the next level. The kind of grievance you didn’t know you were nursing until you heard yourself voicing it. Originator: Neill Groom.
Each name links to its on-chain receipt. Hashes are anchored to Bitcoin via OpenTimestamps; new entries appear as “anchor pending” until the next hourly batch.
Writers and thinkers. A new term you’ve been developing. A label for a phenomenon nobody has named yet.
Marketers and brand strategists. Campaign taglines, product names, slogans. Pitched in a meeting, anchored on the same day, before the client’s legal team trademarks them.
Internet originators. Hashtags before they trend. Meme captions before they go viral. Slang you started in your group chat.
Industry insiders. Acronyms and shorthand for concepts your field hasn’t named yet. The thing that gets called “the <your-name> effect” in a journal five years later — if you can prove you had it first.
Translators and namers. The English phrase you minted for a concept in another language. The name proposal you made for a startup that got picked.
1. Sign in with your email.
2. Type the word or phrase, a brief definition, and any context. Pick the Open tier — you want this public so future use credits you. (First Open carve is free; then $2.)
3. Hash anchors to Bitcoin. Your declaration is timestamped publicly on the chain.
4. When the word takes off, you point at your dashboard or directly at the Bitcoin block. Math beats hindsight.
First Open carve free, then $2 each. Pick the Sealed tier ($5) if you want it private until the moment of credit.