How I Learned to Relax About Gen Alpha Slang

Which brings me, as it does with many of my fellow Gen X parents and boomer grandparents, to an impasse. Should I be educating myself in Gen Alpha slang or just ignoring it? Should I playfully tease my son about his nonsense lingo? Or, heaven forbid, start using it? So I reached out to some linguists, kind of hoping they’d say, “You’re right. Your kid is nuts. His entire generation is ruining language.” But instead, they patiently explained that maybe the reason Gen Alpha slang makes no sense is because it isn’t meant for me.

“It’s somebody else’s language,” says Grant Barrett, a lexicographer for several Cambridge dictionaries and the vice president of the American Dialect Society. “It’s why business jargon often annoys people. We don’t feel included. And that’s a natural human response. But it doesn’t mean that the language itself is bad.”

Jessica Rett, a professor of linguistics at UCLA, explains that it’s part of a larger effort among younger generations to distinguish themselves from the culture of their parents and grandparents. “They do this in a bunch of different ways. They change the music they listen to, they change the fashion they wear, and linguistically, by changing the language they use,” she says. “This all works to do exactly what they want it to do: It delimits their people from other people, and it insulates them from infiltration.”

It works so well that even Rett, 43, sometimes feels confused by it. “If you were to spend time, like I do, grilling 20-year-olds about slang, you still wouldn’t get it all, and certainly not all of the nuance,” she says.

That nuance comes across not just in the slang they use but how they say it. Rett describes it as bidialectal. In other words, they use different dialects, or registers, to talk to their peers than they use when speaking with parents or grandparents. “So it’s unlikely the older generations will be put in a position where they absolutely have to understand slang, and that’s fine,” Rett says. “Kids these days already know they need to interpret us differently than they do their peers.”

Of course, we’re not just trying to understand our kids. When slang leaves you in the dark, it’s hard not to wonder, Are they making fun of us? Is “skibidi toilet” some big joke at our expense?

Just think about the slang of your youth and what your parents and grandparents must’ve thought. For boomers, older generations must’ve been mystified when you said things like “I’m going to split,” “you’re a square” or “don’t harsh my mellow.” Imagine them staring back at you, slack-jawed, wondering, What is this young whippersnapper even talking about?

For my generation, the Xers, my parents couldn’t make heads or tails of us. The first time I told my dad to “take a chill pill, dude,” I thought he was going to kick me out of the house. They never did make sense of slang like “vibing” or “homeslice,” or the difference between “phat” and “fat.”

Rett, in her attempts to explain skibidi to me, put it in perspective. “Its meaning is ineffable, or hard to define,” she explains. “Skibidi is more like ‘wack’ in this respect — its main function is to express heightened emotion, so that emotion can be either positive or negative. If I say, ‘That’s wack’ to my friend, it could be either super cool or messed up.”

It was a light bulb moment for me. Of course, skibidi is just the new wack, a nonsense word I used extensively in my youth. It wasn’t meant to make fun of my parents or alienate them. I loved it because it was slang that belonged to me and my friends alone. If my dad had started a conversation at dinner by saying, “Work was totally wack today,” it would have taken away all of that word’s power and its fun.

Yesterday, when my son came home from school and gave me the typical summation of his day — “skibidi toilet” — I didn’t get angry or confused or make fun of him for his ridiculous vocabulary. I just nodded and said, “That sounds wack.”

He stared back at me, astounded. “Um, OK,” he said, barely suppressing a grin. I must’ve sounded as crazy to him as he did to me. So we had something in common.

It’s not much, but it feels like he and I are actually communicating for the first time in awhile.