Barbara's blog: Do it for the plot

It’s no secret that I am fascinated by language. While at college, a wonderful Professor of Italian had spotted the quiet girl at the back of the class, with her head buried in a poetry book, and had made it her mission to nurture that budding love for literature, writing and the etymology of words. The girl was me and the interest now extends to how language is evolving. One of the most recent developments of that is the GenZ slang.

I am lucky that both Son and Daughter are kind with their opinions and generous with their time when I quiz them endlessly about the customs and habits of their age group, including how they use social media and how they communicate. My intentions are not driven by wanting to speak and act like a GenZ kid, which would be ‘cringe’ if not ‘delulu’ (more on this later!), but by a desire to understand them better so that I can support them in the right way.

Occasional pearls of wisdom are volunteered unprompted by either offspring. Recently, Daughter mentioned she would be visiting a friend who was experiencing a ‘main character vibe era’ in her life and would be ‘spilling the tea’. I enquired how the coursework was coming along and was advised that ‘the brain wasn’t braining’. I am sure you get the gist of what these turns of phrases mean. This is the more intuitive end of the spectrum of the GenZ slang, requiring only marginal intellectual agility: the ‘main character vibe’ refers to the protagonist of a film or book who controls and leads the narrative, and ‘spilling the tea’ is an evolution of ‘spilling the beans’, which means gossiping or sharing interesting information.

But some terms are more obscure, as a conversation with Son proved.

While listening to old Post Malone material during a long drive, a song featured the word ‘savage’. “Nobody uses that anymore”, commented Son, adding that it had been replaced by ‘bussin’’ or ‘lit’, both a synonym of good, but unintelligible to the uninitiated. I probed whether there were other words that had been cast away, and ‘slay’ and ‘sick’ were mentioned. I couldn’t help thinking that ‘groovy’, once popular in the subculture lexicon of 1960s and 70s American hippie slang, had suffered a similar fate, bar having experienced a brief resurgence in the late-1990s film Austin Powers (#iykyk).

One of the most interesting terms of the GenZ slang is ‘glazed’, which refers to a gilding of information, such as something that has been spin-doctored, or that is artificial and exaggerated. If you were gushing over a musician that I didn’t rate, I could ask you ‘why you were glazing them’. But is ‘glazed’ also not a subtle dig at society itself, and our absent, unfocused and restless minds? We are bombarded by a constant influx of information, plagued by boundless consumerism and victims of the sort of perfect life syndrome only possible in the metaverse of social media.

In ‘glazed’ the GenZ calls out both the heavily doctored content we are exposed to daily, enhanced by filters and multiple takes to frame the perfect shot, but also our reaction to it, where IRL is both feared and celebrated.

Although I enjoyed my GenZ language lesson with the offsprings, I should not feel smug of my newly-found knowledge. Slang is by nature fleeting. The expressions will soon spawn into crisp new versions or fall out of favour. But ‘I’ve done this for the plot’ and I am ok with that. ‘No cap’.

Barbara works as an environmental strategist for the aviation regulator and lives a stone’s throw from the South Downs, with her 18-year-old creative daughter, 17-year-old ingenious son and supportive husband.

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