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The fuck is even happening
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2025
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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
But leetspeak was limited to online, you never used it IRL.
Wat a n00b
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.
I'd been trying to dredge together outmoded expressions to awkwardly slip into discussions for a while & never could work out a good way to come up with them. How do you generate those?
I just googled 50s slang.
I've always used "heavens to murgitroid" which I think is something the old granny in Tom and Jerry cartoons used to say.
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 ....What a sweet 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
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" 🤭
No cap, no skibidi rizz detected.
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.
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.
Most non-mainstream millenial slang was related to drugs, I think
This, I can think of like 5 different slang words for a lot of drugs.
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
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!