“Aunt Anne, I have another slang word for you!” my niece exclaimed as I came down the stairs to the beach. Within two minutes, five teenagers who are in various ways related to me were circled around trying to explain a few more new slang words to me.
There are many pleasures to time on the beach in northern Michigan: reading a novel with your toes buried in the warm sand, a breeze coming off the lake; paddle boarding when the lake is calm, and body surfing when it is not; walking along the shore hunting for Petoskey stones; and learning about some of the happenings in the English language from the young people who are on the cutting edge of language change (which is pretty much all young people).
These conversations happen because my younger relatives know that I am interested in their language.
“So can you give me another example of a time when you would yell, ‘Yeet!’?” I ask.
“OK,” my nephew responds, “let’s imagine I’m about to do something I know is stupid, like belly flop off the side of a boat. I could yell, ‘Yeet!’ as I go off the side.”
“Or you could say ‘yeet’ after you see someone do that belly flop, kind of to acknowledge that someone just did something goofy,” another teenager adds.
“Do you know the word thicc to describe a woman who is curvy hot?” my cousin’s daughter asks. I don’t. (And I didn’t know to spell the word that way when I first heard it. And apparently the more c’s, the hotter.) I follow up: “Can you use it for people of any gender or only women?” My informant considers the question for a few moments. “I think it’s only used to refer to women,” she says. “I don’t know,” another voice chimes in, “I have heard it used to refer to guys sometimes.”
I got some props for already knowing RIP (“rest in peace,” pronounced “rip,” and it could be used when you spill your drink all over the floor, for example), take the L (“take the loss” — for example, when you’re up late studying and realize you can’t stay up long enough to cram it all in before the test, so you say, “I’m just going to take the L”), and canceled (as in “Kanye was canceled after his comment about slavery”). I also quite like dumb as an intensifier (e.g., dumb lit, just to use two slang words in a row), which is newer to me.
My favorite slang word of the summer (to date) is mood. As an exclamative, mood is a way to signal that you find something relatable emotionally. So if, for example, someone posts on Facebook that they think they just bombed on a test, you could respond, “Mood,” to say that you empathize. In that case, it may be that you have actually experienced that same situation, but mood doesn’t have to work that way. Mood can just be a way of saying that you hear someone, you get it. And you can say it — it’s not just a written thing.
Then if you get where someone is coming from in a more dramatic situation, you say or write, “Big mood.” My cousin’s other daughter provided this example: Imagine you see a headline that says “Woman Falls Asleep While Robbing Bank,” and you could say “Big mood.” (I should note here that this is just the tip of the slangy mood iceberg.)
One of the features of mood I especially like is that it is fundamentally empathetic. This new generation often gets stereotyped as not having good communication skills, as being uninterested in engaging with other people rather than with their phones. Yet here is this wonderful slang word designed to express understanding. (I am reminded of the slang word same a few years ago, which could do some of the same work.)
I can imagine some readers thinking, “But if they were really empathetic, these young people would say more than ‘mood.’” But slang doesn’t usually work that way. It is snappy and playful and a little rebellious. And while there are lots of words to describe how people look (my informants couldn’t believe I didn’t know looking like a snack/meal/full-course meal) and an ever-proliferating set of slang terms for drunk (one meaning of lit), high (another meaning of lit), and stupid, it’s helpful to remember that slang can also be kind.
I share the story of these beach conversations also to counter the narrative that today’s young people don’t care about language. As I have written about before, all we have to do is ask, and young people have a lot to say about the nuances of slang, as well as of texting and the like. Our questions have the power to nudge them to think even more explicitly about what they know about these new developments in the language, and what fun for us to learn from their expertise.
