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There comes a time in every young person’s life when they realise that they aren’t so young anymore... I mean sure they’re young, but suddenly they’re not quite as young as they thought they were.
Because the true young people are now on the scene and they have their own in jokes and memes and sometimes, sometimes you don’t implicitly get it and you have to do the Google of shame to find out...
I mean, I can only assume this is how certain people must feel. Not me, of course, because I’m still YOUNG AND FUN, I SWEAR.
*Clears search history to hide evidence being baffled and confused by Gen Alpha slang*
So apparently, people born *puke* after the millennium *puke* are now old enough to have personalities and TikTok accounts and they’ve got their own internet buzzwords. And, clearly, I’m taking this news incredibly well.
As someone aging gracefully (read: kicking and screaming) out of being the ‘young generation’, it’s hard to know how to play this. Do I make a big deal out of it by, for instance, writing a column expressing my utter shock that there are people younger and cooler than I am?
Do I brush it off, be aloof, seem unphased by this discovery? Or (the secret third option) do I attempt to assimilate with the Gen Alphas, memorising vocabulary, adopting their lexicon and hoping they appreciate my ‘fun aunt’ energy?
Pictured: Learning new young person slang every year can feel like a losing battle
I probably have done – and will no doubt continue to do – all of the above, depending on who I’m trying to get to like me at any given moment in time.
And, SPEAKING OF TRYING TO GET PEOPLE TO LIKE ME, the very cool internet word of the month is #rizz. Now, this word is an abbreviation of the word ‘charisma’, and it refers to whether or not you’re a smooth talker.
Now, clearly (as you may have been able to tell from the word salad stream of consciousness you have just read) my #rizz is pretty dire. The word #rizz usually describes someone who is charming, particularly in a romantic context.
If someone has #rizz they have a way with words and they’re normally good at flirting. Ugh, even the way I explain it makes me sound OLD: A personage who is endowed with multitudes of ‘rizz’ is particularly talented at courtship and instigating liaisons of a romantic nature.
Pictured: Someone with rizz is usually good at flirting
But it can also just mean that someone’s got a special something about them, that they’re appealing or interesting and have a certain je ne sais quoi.
I just find it so fascinating how much of an impact the Internet has on language. And despite my own existential angst about ageing out of being the youngest person on the planet (it was nice while it lasted), I do find it fascinating to see how this plays out via the next generations.
Perhaps the slang we use on and offline says something about what we value most, or maybe it’s less clear-cut than that, but, as internet buzzwords get added to our dictionaries with every passing year, it’s clear that online culture has made an indelible mark on how we relate to each other.
And through all of that, the magnitude of the passing of time and the complex ways in which language evolves, the only thing that truly matters to me is a young person thinking I’ve got #rizz.
This article first appeared in the October edition of Connect Magazine, which you can read in full below...
