Septum Arms Are Trending on TikTok, Even Though No One Knows What They Are

The best thing about TikTok is that, depending on what kind of videos you like, you can have radically different experiences on the platform. Sometimes, though, you might stumble across something that seems important and have no idea what it means. TikTok is full of acronyms, slang, and phrases that are hard to comprehend, especially if you weren't following along from the beginning.

One recent example of this is the term "septum arms," which has started popping up in more and more places on the platform. Naturally, many wanted to understand what the phrase means. Here's what we know.

"Septum arms" is, on its face, a nonsense phrase. The septum is the tissue in between your nostrils, and your arms are your arms. And yet, these words have gotten paired up for reasons that have baffled many users on TikTok.

It turns out, though, that the phrase doesn't really have any meaning. Instead, it's simply a combination of words that got mashed together by accident and are now popping up everywhere.

The reason the term exists has to do with a video in which someone commented on a woman's arms in a less-than-kind way. Apparently, in the comments under that video, there was a discussion of both septums and arms, and the two terms wound up getting combined by some users. Then, others took the term and ran with it, making their own videos in which they use the term "septum arms" like it has some sort of actual meaning.

While the best explanation seems to be that "septum arms" has no real meaning, some users have suggested that it might suggest a person has large or doughy arms.

Ultimately, though, it seems like the term actually has no real meaning, and it's just a bit of nonsense that TikTok users have decided to run with and enjoy. While that may be frustrating to some who were looking for a more concrete definition, that's TikTok for you.

While you can tailor your algorithm so that your videos eventually don't refer back to what is essentially TikTok lore, things like "septum arms" are a great example of something that even those who spend plenty of time on the platform might not understand. TikTok can, at least at times, be something like a universe unto itself with its own rules and language.

Decoding all of those various things can be tricky, but that's part of what so many love about TikTok. You can spend hours digging into a very particular niche without ever getting to the bottom of it.

Social media has already changed the way we communicate in countless ways. But now, it's also given us terms like "septum arms" that mean absolutely nothing, but are trending on the internet in spite of their total incomprehensibility. Whether you love that or hate it all depends on your point of view.