40 years ago and before, slang had to travel by… get this… word of mouth. Now one obnoxious tik tok influencer (and the word is valid because they do actually influence others) to say something for a 12 year old to make it the new thing in her school, thereby infecting an entire town/village/planet. it’s skibidi if you ask me. And I’m 55.
True. Radio is word of mouth, and the other forms of media are even slower. When one can sit down and doomscroll tik tok for an hour and be exposed to orders of magnitude more information, things are going to change more quickly.
When I was a 12 year old people were drawing that pointy S, which first started showing up in graffiti in the 70’s but became a staple in middle school notebooks by the 90’s. Somehow it had gone fully national without seeming to have any adult influence in its spread.
“Cool” first showed up in the late 1910’s and early 1920’s, and so fully absorbed into the culture that each subsequent generation just knows it without really considering it to be slang.
“My bad” was novel slang in the 80’s, went mainstream in the 90’s, and is still with us today.
I’d guess that among recent slang, “yeet,” “rizz,” and “drip” will have the most staying power, most likely to be picked up unironically by older generations and just propagated from there.
Well, that’s part of why I think those have staying power.
Same with some slang that’s been around but has recently been elevated to new heights, like “cooked” re-entering the slang mainstream and some younger people thinking their generation invented it.
Or newer syntactical/grammatical constructions that borrow from established phrases, like “it’s giving (noun or noun phrase)” to mean some kind of description. Or industry jargon that enters the mainstream. Once those hit a threshold popularity they tend to stick around as well.
40 years ago and before, slang had to travel by… get this… word of mouth. Now one obnoxious tik tok influencer (and the word is valid because they do actually influence others) to say something for a 12 year old to make it the new thing in her school, thereby infecting an entire town/village/planet. it’s skibidi if you ask me. And I’m 55.
Slang travelled through print magazines, underground zines, radio, musicians, books, etc.
True. Radio is word of mouth, and the other forms of media are even slower. When one can sit down and doomscroll tik tok for an hour and be exposed to orders of magnitude more information, things are going to change more quickly.
Radio was huge. Some rapper could make slang local to his street corner famous and it would be in car commercials within two years.
When I was a 12 year old people were drawing that pointy S, which first started showing up in graffiti in the 70’s but became a staple in middle school notebooks by the 90’s. Somehow it had gone fully national without seeming to have any adult influence in its spread.
Also around the same time, “my bad” entered the lexicon, and went from basketball-coded slang to basically mainstream acceptance by the 90’s, with this blog post from 2005 amusedly marking its use among Ivy League faculty members.
On the other hand, we don’t need to try to understand slangs anymore, because they will be obsolete tomorrow in the morning, when a new one appears.
No, some of them just become permanent.
“Cool” first showed up in the late 1910’s and early 1920’s, and so fully absorbed into the culture that each subsequent generation just knows it without really considering it to be slang.
“My bad” was novel slang in the 80’s, went mainstream in the 90’s, and is still with us today.
I’d guess that among recent slang, “yeet,” “rizz,” and “drip” will have the most staying power, most likely to be picked up unironically by older generations and just propagated from there.
Yeet is over a decade old my man.
I am confident that drip is even older lmao
Well, that’s part of why I think those have staying power.
Same with some slang that’s been around but has recently been elevated to new heights, like “cooked” re-entering the slang mainstream and some younger people thinking their generation invented it.
Or newer syntactical/grammatical constructions that borrow from established phrases, like “it’s giving (noun or noun phrase)” to mean some kind of description. Or industry jargon that enters the mainstream. Once those hit a threshold popularity they tend to stick around as well.
But the ones who get integrated into language for the long-term, we will eventually see them all around and it will be impossible to miss