Every generation has slang, but Gen Alpha’s has a particularly unhinged quality, some parents say. Still, experts say their bad rep isn’t totally deserved.
In the beginning, there was “skibidi.”
It appeared abruptly in the lexicons of kids under 14 — the first slang term unique to Generation Alpha. Parents’ ears perked up as they began to hear it around the dinner table. It could mean bad, cool, or nothing at all, their kids explained. Then a dozen more incomprehensible terms followed suit.
Gen Z’s “slay” and “tea” are officially vintage, giving way to “sigma,” “gyatt” and “fanum tax.”
Everyone’s getting whiplash.
Dividing us into generations is a way to make us feel segmented and separated. The concept of generations is made up, we shouldn’t feel tribal about the era we were born in.
I’ve been watching Language Jones lately, and I think he’s got a good and academically well-informed take on this topic.
Thank you for that. I have a new subscription to binge.
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the urban word dictionary is about to get even more popular
I think you mean it’s about to go gyatt, skibidy sigma before the kids get older and it gets a ohio negative aura.
It’s about to go booty elite?
Hyper dingo, no skort!
My 14-year-old isn’t especially slangy, but occasionally she asks me if I’ve heard some term or other, and I invariably haven’t. Most recently, it was “Scene,” which is apparently some sort of fashion aesthetic.
“Scene” was around when I was in middle and high school around 10 years ago.
They were like the preppy goth kids, who listened to Avril Lavigne and such.
Edit: there’s also a Hollywood Undead song that has the lines “wake up, shave beard, grab beer, put on some scene gear”
And Harry don’t mind if he don’t make the scene. He’s got a daytime job, he’s doing all right.
Avril Lavigne? Of Lavigne and Shirley? ;)
Can I tell you something about Avril?
I had totally forgotten this 6 month old post but sure.
I’m 47 years old. I have never even heard of Hollywood Undead.
They’ve been around for nigh on 20 years. Age doesn’t have anything to do with it, it’s musical tastes.
Cool. I was 27 in that case. Why would you expect me to be out there discovering new bands when I was trying to get my career off the ground?
I guess because I’m the same age and was getting my career off the ground at the same time. But everyone has different life experiences. I cannot fathom not exposing myself to new music.
But everyone has different life experiences.
And yet you decided it was unreasonable for me to have not heard of this band.
And there is no way you are my age and “Scene” was a thing when you were in high school. That’s just bullshit. This says that it started in the early 2000s:
Damn you went into this thread pissed off, didn’t you? You replied to the wrong person. I’m the one who said scene was a thing 10 years ago when I was in high school and middle school.
Chill and fully read the comments (username and all) before replying.
I mean this with complete sincerity: Lucky you.
Holywood Undead has some rizz skibidy, no cap frfr
‘Scene’ kids were the Hot Topic emo kids when I was a teenager 20ish years ago. As someone who was into 2nd wave emo, it always made me die a little that ‘Scene’ is what most people think of when they hear ‘emo’.
Reminds me of Nadsat from the movie, A Clockwork Orange. Haven’t read the novel yet.
The book is amazing.
There’s a lot more in the novel that isn’t in the film.
That said, the copy that Kubrick used to adapt into the film did not have the final chapter of the novel (it was an edited down American version) and it is such a better ending than the book.
Slang is stupid, film at 11:00. This is just old people complaining about young people. We’ve been doing this for literally thousands of years. It’s not newsworthy, not even in in the modern age of 6 second attention spans.
This is basically repeated every 10 years. Some of them will stick around for the long-term some will die. I don’t for see skibidi or gyatt stick around long-term. At least not unironical. I’m in my 40s and I don’t have any peers who still use words like “phat” or “whateves”. But someone saying bling would not seem out of place.
Remember that year or two where everything cool was “da bomb”?
Get hip with the new jive, daddy-o!
I thought I was getting old, but I’m proud to say that I knew most of these terms. I still got it, baby!
Skibidi.
After having thoroughly learned the language of their parents, around 8 or maybe 12 years old, children are good at learning languages and they play at doing better than their parents … inventing things … testing them.
They want to know that they are good enough and to prove this to themselves they have to do better in some way than their parents.
As a Gen-Z, I feel this divide is the result of our gen growing up on the internet and Gen-Alpha growing up in the internet. Like culturally I feel Gen-Z still had roots to reality hidden behind layers of absurdism and abstraction. Gen-Alpha however feels like it’s generating new cultural landmarks with no connections to reality.
Like, skibidi was absurdist humor, which is now being covered by absurdist layers. It’s absurdism all the way down! It’s like some twisted form of enlightenment. To clarify I don’t say this in a necessarily negative light, I just think it’s interesting from the viewpoint of our species as a whole.
I know Gen-Z was experiencing a stage of wanting to assert real connections to the world against algorithmic forces, before covid that is, now I think we’re a little scattered again.
I wouldn’t worry too much about the ranting of an out-of-touch opinion writer caught in a moral panic.
They’re just annoyed that the world is changing around them. People have made the same complaint about literally every generation before.
I was thinking about this last night because I saw this meme and felt like it was very “boomer humor” which got me thinking about how humor has seemingly changed throughout the years.
It does seem absurdism is much more common nowadays, however it’s not just that either, there’s layers of nuance usually that makes it “deeper” as well.
Would be interesting to see a deep dive on how humor has evolved through the years aside from my biases. You make an interesting point about it being “no connections to reality” but I’m not sure it’s entirely correct.
Quit taxing their gig so hard-core cruster.
