Back in the 1960s and 1970s there was a lot of talk about the “generation gap.” The gap was understood to be a matter of culture and values, but the reality is that much of it was just about language. Sitcoms and comic books were full of grown-ups thrown by teen slang, exasperatedly asking for translations.
I assumed it was all just overreaction. Surely there’s always some way to work out what new uses of words mean?
I’m learning lately that sometimes there isn’t. I have spent the summer in my Catskills bungalow hideaway listening day in and day out to tweens (my daughters and their friends) talking. I have so often had to ask them what their slang means that one of my daughters started teasingly calling me “Pops,” as if I were a character in an “Archie” comic.
It was humbling, but actually I enjoyed it, because it gave me a front-row view on the processes by which language morphs along, from, say, “Beowulf” to “Baywatch,” one shift at a time.
Take the word “eat.” In some languages of the West African coast, believe it or not, “eat” can mean to become something. In a language like Tuwuli in Ghana, one way to say “I became the captain” is “I came and ate captain,” with the sense perhaps of taking in, ingesting, a role. Because this is generally an unwritten language, there is no way to trace through documents how this usage evolved.
I considered it the most creative, extended usage of “eat” in any language I had ever encountered … until The Kids started using “eat” in a similarly diagonal way.
The first time I heard it, one Gen Z-er had just performed a song. “Girl, you ate it,” her friend said. “Ate what?” I asked. They explained what many readers may already know: that “eat” means “do something really well.” To put a sharper point on it, you can say “she totally devoured that outfit.” It reminds me of what a stretch the word “use” gets in “used to.” As ordinary as a sentence like “We used to go every year” sounds, that usage of “use” is, if you think about it, quite odd. We “utilized” to go every year? “She ate that test!” would have sounded just as crazy to someone in George Washington’s day — or to me, until about three months ago.
I also had to squint, metaphorically speaking, to know what the tweens meant this summer by “you clocked her tea.”
“Tea” began years ago as Black gay or drag slang, referring to gossip that you “spill,” potentially accompanied by holding up the thumb and middle finger as if holding a teacup. But the tweens I know are unaware of that history. (Regardless, they still make that teacup gesture, a tradition that is as meaningless to them as throwing rice at a bride.) Because, I surmise, “clock” can also sound like you deep-sixed someone or cleaned their clock, they use the expression to refer to winning an argument. As for the “tea,” they hear the word as simply the 20th letter of the alphabet.
So random, and yet so normal. Letters tend to generate expressions. “OK” started in Jacksonian America with a jolly journalistic misspelling of “all correct” as “Oll korrect.” That was abbreviated as “OK,” became a journalistic in-joke, percolated outward into general expression and is now used worldwide. Think also of “on the Q.T.” from “quiet.”
Hey, and then there’s “chat.” People were saying “hey” as far back as Early Middle English, as in “Hei!, hwuch wis read” — or “Hey, what wise counsel” — a line from “The Legend of St. Katherine of Alexandria.” No one knows how it first happened, but among theories on the origins of “Yo!,” I find most likely the one tracing it to immigrants who spoke the Naples dialect of Italian, in which the word for “young man” is guaglione, pronounced “gwoll-YO-nay.” Now, as I first heard from some of my students last fall, there is “chat!,” of which this summer I have gotten an earful and then some.
The kids use it at least once a minute. “Chat, we should do this every year!” “Chat, I’m sorry, using this glitter wasn’t a good idea.” (Is it ever?) Supposedly this started with people addressing the chat section of online platforms such as Twitch. Then people started using the word in spoken group conversations, as a form of collective address. Now the meaning has generalized into a way to call attention, something akin to, “listen, everybody” or, more demotically, “folks” or “you guys.”
Most terms the internet lends us are concrete things like names, nouns and actions like gamers’ “pwn,” a variant typing of “own,” in the sense of “outdo” and “hit refresh.” “Chat!” is different — not a thing or a process but a word used to get attention. This is the internet truly penetrating language, reaching the pragmatics, in the sense I discussed last week: verbal gestures to convey attitude, indicate shared experience or mark something as novel.
I have especially enjoyed watching the birth of a term of tribal affection. My daughters’ BFF was vastly amused (for reasons beyond me) by a meme of a rather corpulent cat eyeing a fast-food delivery through a glass door, with the caption, “chill out biggie it’s not for you.” She and the others started using “biggie” to refer to one another. Back in June this was meant mockingly, with reference to matters of eating and size. By August it had softened into a kind of joshing tribal label like “dude.” They use it to chide without antagonism: “Biggie, you took my seltzer!” They use it in praise: “You did it, you biggie!” It is more bungalow pragmatics. I’ve even heard them use it to mean “some guy” — they say of a figure in a video game “Biggie ran around a corner!”
Social bonding terms often begin in this way, with a concrete definition wearing down into a less literal but perhaps more powerful mark of belonging. “Dude” first referred to a male fancy dresser, a dandy, likely derived from “Yankee Doodle.” Today it means roughly the same thing as “yo.” No Brits singing “Yankee Doodle” two and a half centuries ago could have imagined that one day, a shortened version of “doodle” would become common coin across American descendants of enslaved African people. They would be further stunned that after a while it came to be used among women of every race to signal gender-neutral fellowship. The meaning has drifted as far as my tweens’ “biggie” has from a hungry cat.
This is why linguists just describe rather than judge. At any given time, no one can know which parts of the language will end up drifting into fascinating new directions. Every language — and every dialect of every language — is vibrating with potential.
John McWhorter (@JohnHMcWhorter) is an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University. He is the author of “Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter: Then, Now and Forever” and, most recently, “Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.” @JohnHMcWhorter
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