I’ve just reached an important adult milestone. Getting married? No. Having a baby? No. Buying a house? Don’t be ridiculous, I’m a writer in Australia. This milestone was small but important: I finally had to Google a gen Z slang term.
I know this may be something many of you have passed already, along with your houses and babies, but I am someone who has been online for a long time. It’s been necessary for my career but it’s also my favourite hobby: going on the internet.
I never needed to research slang, not because I use the terms or have a specific interest in the youth of today, but because spending a lot of time on the internet meant I absorbed them through osmosis. It’s science! I would see a post start popping off in a far-flung corner of the world and watch as it migrated platforms. I knew the context. I knew who was using it. I knew when it should be used. I knew when it was already embarrassing to use it. I wasn’t speaking the language but I was fluent. Now, I’m joining the ranks of the bamboozled elderly and Googling “quiet on the creek”.
My parents might have been able to keep up with slang back when people my age were doing it but the craziest we got was “roflcopter” and “pwned”. The internet was less fragmented. There was a time when someone terminally online could feel as though they had a rough map of the place and knew where all the cultural hubs were.
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Today’s internet has no centre.
Instead of one internet, there are endless overlapping internet microcultures, each with their own language evolving independently. Reddit, Discord, Twitch, TikTok, streaming culture, gaming culture – they all experience an endless flow of changing language. It’s no longer possible to understand everything, even if you wanted to. Technology and culture are moving so fast, all the time, it makes sense that young people are constantly coming up with new terms.
There are pedants and young people haters out there who get het up about the slang and the memes and the 6-7 of it all but, generally, I love it. Some slang terms, the ones that trickle down from streaming or “incel” culture, can be ugly or negative. Many of the more creative or sticky terms originate in POC or queer culture. A lot of what makes it to the mainstream is clever or funny or right. For example, it’s already probably outdated now, but “rizz” for “charisma” is delightful.
I appreciate the rapid evolution of language, the inventive wordplay, even if it does get annoying at times. Some of it will stick, some will get left behind. But now I no longer have a front-row seat. The algorithm has left me behind.
That’s OK, it has to be that way. As you can see, I am accepting this with quiet dignity. Others should follow my example – if you have to Google a slang term, you absolutely shouldn’t be using it. If you are a politician or police PR person, please avoid using slang to try to appeal to young people. It will never work, it will only ever embarrass you and in some cases it will kill the poor term dead in its tracks.
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I’m still going to keep finding out what slang means for my own interest, and to ensure I can make some sense of what the kids in my life are trying to communicate. But I know my limits. I’m no longer absorbing the language just by being online; I am studying it. I’m unc and chopped – and that’s OK.
