Imagine yourself after a typical day, scrolling through your Twitter, Instagram, or Vine feeds. I would not be surprised if you saw exactly what I do each time I log on: for example, countless captions and hashtags including ‘Bae’.

Whether it’s an Instagrammed picture of someone and their ‘bae,’ a tweet about ‘Netflix and chilling with bae,’ or a Vine with the caption ‘When bae posts a selfie,’ with the heart-eye emoji of course, we tend to see bae everywhere. It is at that realization where I began to question, why bae? Why use a word that stands for “Before Anyone Else” to describe everything from food to people, thereby losing the meaning of this newfound ‘word’ completely.

“Are descriptions such as actual proper names and the terms best friend, irreplaceable, incomparable, etc. no longer good enough?” asked Natasha Zarinsky from Esquire.com in her article What the Hell is Up with ‘Bae’?.

Society has adapted this trend, making it so lucky to be used as both a noun and an adjective. The most basic terms, boyfriend and girlfriend, have slowly been disappearing from our mouths as well. Exactly how important can one person mean to another if they are too scared to call them by their real name, resorting to a made up acronym. If a person loves someone or something, they should just say it, not hide behind an overused term that our social media community has created.

Wondering exactly how popular ‘bae’ has become, I turned to a pretty reliable source: Google. What I found was no surprise at all. In The Huffington Post, an article titled, 5 Words That Are On Fleek For 2015, And 5 That We Literally Can’t With Anymore, just happened to catch my attention with its completely casual name. It informed me that the #1 trend of 2015 is ‘bae’ with the definition of ‘before anyone else’, but has been adopted to be synonymous with ‘babe’ or ‘sweetie’”.

Though the trends ‘thirsty’ and ‘on fleek’ only fall to second and third place compared to ‘bae’, this number one ranked trend has managed to gather the most attention from all different types of social media. Recently, there has been speculation over the correct meaning of ‘bae’. While some use it as an acronym, the dictionary will happily tell us that ‘bae’ is a Danish word for poop, so when people decide to say ‘you’re bae’, they are, in fact, saying ‘you’re my poop’.

Honestly, how could this word become such a trend when most of the people using it don’t even know one of the correct meanings behind it? I have to admit that it’s a little concerning to watch a relatively unknown term before 2013, besides a few appearances throughout rap songs in the mid-2000s, become such a worldwide used term. Even during my daily walks from class to class in school, my ears never fail to pick up the faint sound of someone incorporating ‘bae’ into their normal vocabulary. I can only hope that my children don’t go around calling their friends ‘baes’, and that I won’t have to explain to them that they are actually calling them ‘poops.’

However, as easy as it may seem to call someone your ‘bae’, just remember that if they knew the true meaning of this word, you may not be able to consider them as that anymore. You may, instead, decide to refer to them by their real name.