From Sabrina Carpenter to J.Lo, when did everything get so code-coded?

Freud has Freudian just as Byron has Byronic, and Kafka his Kafkaesque. Such terms are called eponymous adjectives, the funny stuff included, like Woolfish, Plathetic or plain old Audenary.

Away from writers, English can encapsulate anyone’s manner. If you win a race by keeping your feet, you are Bradbury-like. Bradbury-esque. Winning an event three years in a row makes you Makybe Divish. Maybe Makybe Divine.

Note the play in all this. Often the speaker builds words on the fly, treating language like an IKEA factory, toggling pieces into improv furniture. How fun to say that a coat hanger is Harbour Bridgy, or the Harbour Bridge is coat hangry. This is zany English making sense.

The same zest applies to the newest member of this suffix club. Instagram began the trend, as seen in a 2024 post where singer Olivia Rodrigo and her beau Louis Partridge are “Bella Swan and Edward Cullen coded”. Or fellow vocalist Sabrina Carpenter is deemed Barbie-coded. Or J.Lo’s outfit at last year’s Met Gala was Maid in Manhattan coded.

The gist is the vibe, what aura a person emanates. Last week Time Out described a Balgowlah gym as “Miami-coded”. The hyphen is optional but the claim stays linked, turning a cultural reference into a cultural affiliation, plus a pop test of your in-group status. Either you know each part of the equation (singer + actor + Twilight franchise) or you flunk the grade.

As a word, code defines our epoch. The noun harks back to Latin’s codex, a book of rules. This draws on the Proto-Indo-European stem of tree or tail. The cognate clan includes coda and codicil, the respective add-ons of opera and wills. Just as now, code is the trunk upholding our modern canopy, from source code to vibe-coding, QR to barcode. No wonder, then, that coded (as annex) has found its place at the table.

Indeed, the suffix is salvaged from analogue days, re-spun by Gen Z. Since a century back, Hollywood types dealt with the Hays Code, the censorship guidelines preventing studios from airing profanities or drug use, sexual perversion or the ridicule of clergy. Even smuggling and safe-cracking were eligible for a wrist slap.

Compelling the queer-coding of early TV, where gay characters had to furl their flag behind a syndrome of tics and hints signalling the truth nobody could say. Villainising was a popular ploy, from drag-queen Ursula in The Little Mermaid to the queer-coded stowaway on Jupiter 2, Dr Zachary Smith.

Aliens in general have lent creators the luxury to signal difference, helping to evolve our cultural diet from queer-coding to queermaxxing in a way, the rainbow agenda celebrated in the likes of Queer as Folk (1999) or the animated Steven Universe (2013). Now each letter of LGBTQIA is spelt across storylines enriching Sex Education, Wentworth, Bridgerton, Heartbreak High and countless more.

Hence the language shift we’re seeing today, where the pretence of queer-coding has become the resemblance of -coded as handy descriptor. By itself, code feeds on data, shapes our choices, drives our systems and invents our whole Orwellian world. Making this new suffix role, playing the playful -ish card, a welcome splash of colour in our own social dress code.

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