Estimated read time: 2-3 minutes
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Editor's note: This is part two in a two-part series about the mystery that will always be youth slang. Read part one here.NEXT GEN — "Kids, I don’t know what’s wrong with kids these days. Kids! who can understand anything they say?"
— “Bye Bye Birdie” (1963)
So you want to understand what kids are saying these days. As we learned in part one of this series from a group of well-meaning newscasters in Toledo, memorizing vocabulary and shooting it back at youths to relate to them is not enough. It may come from a good place, but it will almost always land with a cringey clang.
Your first option is to embrace that you won’t understand and just accept your confused state. Cool, daddy-o? Gurl, ya heard? A’ight, let’s twerk it and werk it.
Your second option is to work really hard to keep up with the fast-paced changes of youth slang so you can always be hep to the jive. If this is the option you choose, then you’ve come to the right place to get started.
This short and accessible video offers up definitions for some of the most confusing current slang. You’ll learn the meaning of words and phrases such as “suh,” “dipset,” “weird flex but OK” and other things we heard from the newscasters in part one of this series.
Alright, alright, the truth is this video won’t help you much. You’ll probably be even more confused because yeet is yeet, according to the video. Ultimately, it’s just a self-deprecating and hilarious commercial to try and sell T-shirts that say “yeet” on them. But it’s still a true delight.
Despite that fact that you didn’t learn much in this video, there is one real takeaway from this series: Language is always changing and you can’t stop it. You can get mad, you can rage against the machine, you can make an Académie Française like the French to try and keep words the way you want them, but you will never succeed. Ask any linguist to learn more.
I’m finna dipset, yeet.
