I’m 32 but the original one reads like news from the new Donkey Kong to me
I honestly don’t remember ever having this kind of slang when I was a kid. If anything, our slang was borrowed from previous generations. (“Dude, that’s cool.”) I’m an old millennial, and I speak the same as Gen X and Boomers, it feels like. I never remember my parents asking “what the hell are you saying?”
Am I just forgetting? Is there a late-90s, early-00s equivalent that I’ve just purged from memory?
lulz u f0rg0t l33tsp33k
p0wned
j00 1337 h4xx0r5 r00l
p0mn1 c1rcu2 l0l
Which was mostly used ironically or only specific games or forums, not for news headlines.
Probably because you grew up with it an understand it. Here’s some 1950s brainrot slang:
I’m a circled guy to an ex paper shaker when this bird dog tried to bash her ears at this fat city place, not supermurgitroid!
The best part about that scene is that this is Barbara Billingsley, aka June Cleaver.
Haha! . . . Translation, please?
I’m married to an ex cheerleader and this pick up artist was trying to flirt with her when we went out to a nice restaurant, not cool!
Wowza!
That is genuinely harder to understand than the tweet
I was reading the memoir of a Battle of Britain pilot published posthumously in 1943 when he used the word “ginormous” (the word was even in the included glossary, explained as a combination of gigantic and enormous). It was very surprising as I’d always assumed that word was Valley Girl speak that dated to the 1980s at the earliest.
Literally any discussion about Pokeyman (or Yugioh, etc.) our parents overheard was complete nonsense noises to them. I’ve had this brought to my attention by my mother, but only as an adult.
Also, anything we picked up from our era of flash videos - e.g., someone saying “so, this is the <x>…What a sweet <x> you might say” and someone else reflexively responding “round”, or a loop of “badger” and “mushroom” between friends: also nonsense.
In any case, it’s an important skill to learn the new slang: as an old, it gives you the power to make it “cringe” by using it. Very fun, on god
My grandma would always say “pokemans” and it took me a while to realize she was doing it intentionally to annoy us
it gives you the power to make it “cringe” by using it.
With great power, comes great responsibility. Said responsibility is to ensure that the kids stop using that nonsense by always seeing old people using it “wrong” 🤭
I think due to the internet being less of a thing, slang was a lot more localised.
We definitely got a bit of influence from London slang (I grew up outside London) that never made it up to my cousins in Lancashire, however they had a load of different slang I hadn’t heard of.
I saw a post about slang being linked to platforms shadow blocking and de-monetizing posts with key words i.e. dead, suicide etc. Which lead to “not alive” slang, or something similar.
I’m too old for this.
Nah, you’re not wrong. Sure, there was some more obscure stuff, but I’d say most could be figured out by context or from a traceable evolution from previous generations’ slang. The difference now is video-based social media has slang spreading and evolving at lightspeed. It’s impossible to keep up unless you’re immersed in that bubble either directly or by proxy of peers.
For a recent example, watching how quickly “crashout” spread among the YouTube creators I normally watch was really incredible. I have no idea where it started but now it’s everywhere.
Gaming slang, for sure. Also, all of the early internet initialisms like LOL
Yeah I’m on the same page as you - I remember we had some little differences here and there but it was nothing like it is today.
They’re super proud of it too - the zoomers around me like to talk about it and explain their slang and I have to bit my tongue because I feel like if I was honest and told them 99% of their slang is dumb as shit I would just sound like the old ‘get off my lawn’ type.
Though that would still be preferable to a dad in my orbit who has gone all in on the slang of his alpha kids and just sounds like the ‘hello fellow youth’ type.
I never remember my parents asking “what the hell are you saying?”
I was a teenager in the 1980s. My dad picked me up from a party one night and happened to see the video that was playing on MTV. During the ride home he went on and on about how disturbing the imagery and lyrics from the video were.
It was “Cuts Like a Knife” by Bryan Adams. Imagine thinking fucking Bryan Adams is triggering the apocalypse lol. He’s Canadian for pete’s sake!
I hope Baby Gronk talked to his doctor about that drip.
40 years ago and before, slang had to travel by… get this… word of mouth. Now one obnoxious tik tok influencer (and the word is valid because they do actually influence others) to say something for a 12 year old to make it the new thing in her school, thereby infecting an entire town/village/planet. it’s skibidi if you ask me. And I’m 55.
Slang travelled through print magazines, underground zines, radio, musicians, books, etc.
Radio was huge. Some rapper could make slang local to his street corner famous and it would be in car commercials within two years.
True. Radio is word of mouth, and the other forms of media are even slower. When one can sit down and doomscroll tik tok for an hour and be exposed to orders of magnitude more information, things are going to change more quickly.
When I was a 12 year old people were drawing that pointy S, which first started showing up in graffiti in the 70’s but became a staple in middle school notebooks by the 90’s. Somehow it had gone fully national without seeming to have any adult influence in its spread.
Also around the same time, “my bad” entered the lexicon, and went from basketball-coded slang to basically mainstream acceptance by the 90’s, with this blog post from 2005 amusedly marking its use among Ivy League faculty members.
This one is actually easy to parse. I’m assuming baby gronk is Gronkowski’s kid. I’m not big into American football but it was almost impossible to not hear about Gronk a few years ago. Normally drip is fashion or style so drip king in this context would probably mean ability on the field. Rizz is just short for charisma, so they are asking of he’s just being hyped by whoever that last person they refer to. I’m not sure who that is and I don’t think it’s really worth looking up. Baby gronk is still a child, of course this is all manufactured hype.
Wait, that was easy to parse?
A lot of that is a couple years old now.
I suspect you’re making half of this stuff up but I can’t prove a thing
No. Baby gronk was a sensation a few years ago in like u12 football because he was bigger than all the other kids ie he is a “baby” gronk. His dad promotes him hella on socials and now he’s an internet celebrity. “Drip king” can refer to a lot. Here I’d say it’s how well does he dress and what kind of aura does he have. But it’s a catch all term in this context. Livvy Dunne is a former LSU gymnast who became a huge internet celebrity around the same time as baby gronk, so there was a lot of talk of baby gronk rizzing her up and iirc they met up one time.
“Baby gronk rizzing up Livvy” is also a meme that has been around a couple years because it’s a silly sentence.
Ive heard this meme so many times and never once suspected baby gronk was referring to a real person. I thought it was that fat purple mc Donalds character.
I’m now rooting for baby gronk to rizz up livvy dunne
Ha! My penultimate daughter said something to me the other day and I was like “huh?” because I thought I’d misheard her, it didn’t sound like words. She repeated the exact same string of sounds, and I was like, “ok I didn’t mishear you, but that just sounds like nonsense”.
Later in the week she showed me a “Needo Nice Squishy Cube” - that was what she had been talking about. The imminent arrival of the blue needo nice.
This is the product in question. Had no idea it was a thing. If it’s not sticky, it might be a cool office fidget toy.
Yeah, now I want one…
Oh my God. I had to show this to the aforementioned penultimate daughter because her favorite show in the world is
Supernatural.
She has a life size cutout of Castiel in her bedroom. Not kidding.
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Is [celebrity noun 1] the new [trendsetter], or is he just getting [influenced with sexual undertones] by [celebrity noun 2]?
If you hunt down the article they’re referring to, it’s very self-aware. They made the headline ridiculous on purpose.
Imagine that. A tabloid news rag that used a clickbait headline? I’m shocked! SHOCKED!
… Well, not that shocked.
I never understood slang as a kid but I’m finally starting to figure it out. By the time my kids are teenagers, I’ll be a pro. They won’t be able to hide anything from me.
A few more years, and I’ll finally become cool. Hehe, yes, just a few more years…
I’m a school bus driver and my kids act like their slang is some kind of secret language that I can’t possibly understand. They apparently aren’t aware that google is a thing.
Urban dictionary ftw
The older I get the more young people sound like dolphins chattering.
I’m a big fan of the word ‘calc’. It’s short for calculator by the way, I’m just using slang. Oh by the way if anyone’s new to the stream, calc is short for calculator. I’m just using slang.
Flipping a grunt is what I call an especially difficult fecal birth.
Bat Boy would never
ITT sad fucks who listen to their parents’ music whining about language evolving as it does and always has.
want language that stays the same? go learn fucking latin and leave those of us who speak living languages be.
There’s “living” like a forest and there’s “living” like bathroom mold.
People are joking in this thread and its normal older generations dont understand, deal with it.
Beside that, drips was the slang word for gonnorhea, strange evolution like if your kids start to say raw dogging instead of like.
Here two example: 1 look at my drip (Old) look at my gonnorhea (New) look at my outfit
2 I really raw dogged my teacher (hypothetical) (Old) I really fucked my teacher without a condom (New) I really like my teacher
This is what is going on and where all the fun is in this specific slang, no need to thank me for the explanation.
I flip warthogs personally.
