« Introduction | Main | If Bluto can do it, so can you. »
October 8, 2007
IDK, my BFF Jill?
This is the opening of a column by William Safire in the recent college-themed issue of the New York Times Magazine:
Sketchy about the lingo being spoken by today’s adultalescents? As those in their late teens and early adulthood like to say, Ah-ite!
Ah-ite, indeed. There's also this column from The Philadelphia Inquirer:
Last spring, as a group of students filed into my class room, one of the girls shrieked, "Sick! I just want to vomit!" I whipped out the hall pass and held it out to her at arm's length. No way was I catching her germs. I needn't have worried; apparently sick means something is really cool. And of course anything that incredible makes you want to vomit. It only follows that hot actually means cool, gnarly translates into awesome, and gangsta denotes friend. Maybe they're all playing Mad Libs and just haven't told the adults.
You'd think that after The New York Times published a piece in the early nineties on grunge slang (that included the phrase "swingin' on the flippity-flop," meaning hanging out, and "lamestain," meaning an uncool person [View image])--slang that turned out to be completely fabricated as part of an elaborate hoax by a bored Sub-Pop employee--writers would be a little warier of publishing this type of article, but apparently not.
Anyway, I hate to have to inform any adult readers about this, but teenagers do not actually speak in acronyms and refer to themselves as adultalescents. You must realize that these articles are purely designed to play on your fears of being unhip as well as confirming your long-held belief that kids these days are not what they used to be (because when you were a kid, you had to walk to school in the snow, and do math problems by hand, etc.). Basically, don't go around calling your wife shawty or anything. That's just sketchy.
Posted by Jaime on October 8, 2007 11:30 AM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://forum.connpost.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/276
