I bet you thought this was going to be a quasi-scientific, journalistic roadmap to understanding the stupidest words people are using today on the internet. It’s not, sorry.
Instead, it’s going to be an argument as to why you should never, ever feel any desire to learn those words, use them, or feel like (your) kids know something more important than you for understanding the contemporary buzzwords that will someday come to define their generation.
Gyat. Skibidi. Rizz. Gridi. Sigma. Sussing. Bussing. Mewing. Not long before, it was JOMO, on fleek, adulting. You said nonsense like that when you were a kid, remember? “Wicked!” “Radical!” “Bogus!” “Bonus!” “Totally!” “Grok that!” “Going mental!” Are you still saying it? (I mean, maybe, if it somehow survived the means of the natural selection of words in a lexicon; you may still be “spacing out” sometimes, that’s understandable.) But do you remember how stupid it really sounded coming out of your pre- and/or post-pubescent mouth?
Well in case you don’t, here’s the answer: just as stupid as it does now.
Put another way, it’s like a raccoon feces salesman who comes to your door and tries to sell you raccoon feces. Would you buy any? Or would you give him ten seconds to get out of your face before you release your over-stimulated Pomeranian, who can smell the free samples in his briefcase?
It’s not a license or skill any adult would desire to possess or flaunt. Unless it’s a vehicle for the ultimate goal of public entertainment. In which case: stupid away.
You know where slang comes from? It has been and always will be an appropriation of variations of dialect among minorities, or something that originated with entertainers, writers or disc jockeys of whatever era in question.
It pretty much all started—in American English, anyway—with Harlem jive. Actually, you could probably back it up to Vaudeville. Or even the invention of the newspaper, maybe, and the occasional writer or journalist who had a knack for wordplay. Or novelists—they’re among the innovators, too. But the main point is that majorities of socioethnic classes, via the youngest of age groups to really start to care about this kind of thing, have always taken words and phrases that someone fringe had concocted and sprinkled them into their everyday dialogue ad nauseam, both ridiculously and unironically. African American culture, LGBTQ+ culture, the works of writers and musicians of an underground mentality and momentarily-inspired wit—these are the idiomatic treasure troves that normies have plundered for generations in search of the next ‘in crowd’ ID badge to flash among their peers, if they weren’t already part of the popular sports team or cheerleading squad or whatever.
The golden age of rap music launched a lot of slang into the mainstream when I was a kid. Before that, I don’t know. Jazz? It had been a very outside-mainstream-yet-somehow-considerably-mainstream art form for decades. And then there was the counterculture. So, drugs, basically. Forgot to mention them, too.
Why? Because it was all “cool”. If you couldn’t invent the slang word yourself, you could use it and feel like you were part of a group outside the norm, where cool is always going to reside. Hanging out, smoking. Or ignoring you while scrolling through its fucking iPhone. It was like a password into those little social groups that kids are desperate to be a part of at that age, when their identities are beginning to form and gel into the considerably boring adults they’ll likely one day become. You were like Che Guevara, only without actually having to do anything meaningful or dangerous with your life. If you look back, a direct correlation between the need or desire to be cool (whatever that really means) and the neologisms of the time has always been ubiquitous.
I don’t have a psycholinguist sitting next to me to verify that, but come on.
Of course, there are exceptions. Some words just make it in due to cultural events that were so popular every single American with a radio, television or the early days of the internet likely knew about them (e.g., “having a meltdown”, “going postal”, “freaking out”, etc.) But, still, someone had to invent the phrase. And it’s very likely not some 12-year-old kid. They’re just the mindless messengers of the current iteration of an ever-changing fad. Like you were. Until you grew up. Which they will one day, too.
Don’t use getting old as an excuse to revert back to being nonsensical and cringey. Unless you’re so old that you just don’t care. Or can’t help it.
