“Kamala is so brat.” ”Starmer is serving cagoule.” “It’s giving non-summer.” “He has no rizz.” “Oh, I’ve heard he’s a sigma?” “The Piccadilly line is a bop, the Victoria line is so based.”
Hi, I’m a Gen Z and I speak in tongues. So does everyone else I know. And we don’t really care if you don’t understand it, in fact we like it, because that means you’re not in on the joke.
Take brat summer, for example. It’s everywhere, and yet its being prohibitively gatekept by Gen Z. To be fair, I have not found a single Gen X-er or boomer who could convincingly tell me what it means. Many of Gen Z would even argue that millennials don’t get it, despite the term being coined by a literal millennial, Charli XCX. Hence the hundreds of “What is brat summer and what does Kamala Harris have to do with it?” explainer articles last week.
However, as I’ve been gradually climbing the age scale (I’m 26, so very much in older range of Gen Zs) I have started to notice an unusual chill in the air as well. Words rush past me that I don’t understand. Gyatt? Genny neutch? Billie Eilish “dapped up” Stephen Colbert? Wait, what do you mean Michael Bay is making a movie based on Skibidi Toilet? (Real news, by the way).
you know who else is having a brat summer? my nephew tyler! he bit a kid at summer school
— Patrick Doran (@lunch_enjoyer) July 26, 2024
For the first time in my life, the kids are overtaking me in setting the cultural agenda, and I’m being left behind like Rue and Jules at that train station in the season finale of Euphoria. Sorry, let me put it in words a millennial would understand. I’m becoming cheugy.
It’s given me a small dose of sympathy for my older co-workers who must put up with indecipherable conversations from the resident office Gen Zs on a daily basis. How they refrain from rolling their eyes at me when I say “it’s giving EOD,” when I mean that a piece of work will be delivered at the end of the day, I don’t know.
But it’s also made me realise that we’re incapable of saying what we really mean. Because making endless references or speaking entirely in slang can come at the cost of meaningful conversations.
Millennials were the first mass-therapised generation. This has led to some pretty unbearable cr*p from them, and therapy speak is just as pervasive as TikTok slang these days. But it’s accessible: that’s the whole point. Even if it’s ridiculous and distinctly un-British (you don’t have the mental capacity right now to deal with this email? Really? Just pretend you never saw it like a normal person) it does help people understand you better.
Gen Z slang is all about shutting people out. It’s an inside joke, the more unintelligible the better. It’s in keeping with its etymology. Much of the slang used by Gen Zs emanates from queer and black communities. Back in the day it would have been used as a way of communicating more intimately or surreptitiously within those communities and people often code-switched while at work or around parties from other communities. But now we use it in Zoom calls and emails. I even saw a LinkedIn post about “How to harness your office rizz,” the other day, which was obviously the most rizzless thing I’ve ever seen.
When your whole modus operandi is being exclusionary, it doesn’t make for a lot of meaningful conversation. Sure, it’s funny, because you can recognise a word you understand and chuckle at it to yourself, like that meme of Beyoncé playing on a Nintendo DS. But look at 2020s TikTok versus early 2010s Twitter, for example. Back in the day, people used to post their actual thoughts on Twitter. Details of their daily movements. Hell, even celebrities did it. It made for beautiful moments, such as the old Kanye West adage: “I hate when I'm on a flight and I wake up with a water bottle next to me like oh great now i gotta be responsible for this water bottle” [sic].
@planetjedward Jedward is a lifestyle #jedward
♬ 360 - Charli xcx
If I open my TikTok app today, I am served a video showing one of the Jedward brothers with the caption “serving Junt.” Twitter is much the same. Would I really be missing out that much if I didn’t know what that meant?
Gen Z's poor communication is something that’s becoming increasingly obvious to older generations, whether it’s via our use of slang at work, our inability to take phone calls (text me first or I’m not picking up, sorry) or how much we struggle to make a constructive argument. Our annual societal microcosm, Love Island, has proved this, with many of the contestants being unable to resolve a heated discussion, but perfectly able to fire indirect comments at each other like they’re subtweeting them.
I don’t think I’m going to stop using slang. And I don’t think we should. Plus, one of the purest joys in life is teaching an older person young people’s slang. They say you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, but our culture editor used the term “mid” unprompted last week and I was overcome with pride.
But perhaps we should stop leaning so heavily on what is essentially a series of inside jokes just to make tangential bonds with our peers. There is great benefit to hanging out with people of different generations. Maybe if we learn to speak with a couple more syllables here and there, we might be able to form a full-on friendship with them.
