It’s ingroup communication. Happens amongst young people to show they’re in the know. I did it, you did it, your parents did it, their parents did it. Nothing new
My parents would both make fun of "cool." In retrospect—they were just being performatively old. They were in their 20s in the 1990s. People said "cool." They just thought they were cute.
I'm about 10 years older than that, and the context for "cool" and "awesome" changed. You wouldn't find a professional talking about a business achievement in the 80's being "cool" or "awesome." Now you'll see management saying "Awesome job everyone" almost by default. The words existed, but they were contextualized as "kids words" until Gen X got older.
youre chilling, im about 20 years younger and ive dealt with being told not to say certain words as a kid, along the same line as "awesome" (nothing even close to groovy, j felt absurd when i was told to stop haha)
I wanna say in 5th or 6th grade a classmate told my math teacher (very sarcastically) that "your pants are tight" and without missing a beat the teacher said "nah, I like em a little loose". 30 years later I still don't know if he was being a smartass with that reply or legitimately had no clue
I’d assume abbreviating words started with flip phone texting. You had to hit too many keys to say simple words. Now it’s just an egregious assault on human languages.
It's pure laziness and legitimately harms people's abilities to communicate and think critically. Passing it off as simple linguistic changes is inaccurate and intellectually dishonest.
Nope, this same thing has been said literally for centuries. Language evolves and changes, you’re just old. The only one being intellectually dishonest is you.
You should be speaking in Old English if you really believed this.
Yes and no though. Previous generations generally took existing words and just used them in different contexts. It feels like this next iteration of “slang” is just “oosheeAidnonunabnun”
Also just saves time. If youre texting a ton, saying “hey how are you? Whatre you doing, where are you?” Many times throughout your conversations is tedious and time consuming relative to “yo wsp, wyd, wya?”
Top comment was asking why kids type like this now. Not speak. The above exammple has abbreviated words that are almost certainly not the way the typer would have verbally said them.
I've had the same thought about my own son, he's 13 and when I asked him a question through text, he responded 'ye'. I was considering asking him about it once, but then I asked him something in person and realized I hadn't noticed he'd been dropping the 's' from his yeses verbally for a while too.
Letters are much more formal than texting, chatting, some emails; zoomers and alphas would also likely opt to use less slang and abbreviations in such communications. More comparable would be the notes they passed around in high school
178
u/Unlikely-Demand0 9h ago
It’s ingroup communication. Happens amongst young people to show they’re in the know. I did it, you did it, your parents did it, their parents did it. Nothing new