The 40 year olds know Gen Z slang and it scares me: We need to embrace slang
I talk about the hate for slang
Here’s the scene:
I’m sitting in my lecture classroom, frantically scribbling down notes. My lecturer, a 40-ish1 year old woman, is talking about an opera theatre called the Opéra-Comique. She’s explaining how it’s a place that was generally quite accessible to audiences in the past:
“So this is a pretty, like, ‘norm-core’ place, actually.”
Record-scratch. Freeze. Rewind.
Norm-core?
She says it so casually, so normatively, that I’m doubting if I even heard it right. By this time, she’s moved on, so I hurriedly pick up the sentence I left hanging and finish my notes. I only think about it after the lecture. Did I really hear it right?
Let’s run it back
This isn’t the first time it’s happened. I’ve gone multiple times hearing words like “metrosexual” and “The Eras Tour” being used in the same sentence as “academic writing” and “misogyny and classicism”. And I lose my mind every time.
I’ve had my fair share of adults referencing pop culture that I know. I’ve had a lecturer reference a 1900s music piece to Despacito. That’s all fine and well and incredibly funny. But Despacito was 8 years ago, so there is some sense of datedness the statement carries. It’s like if someone told you to share your life on a social media platform like Facebook.2 Whatever. I’m used to it.
But norm-core?
For my less brain-rotted friends. This is more Gen Alpha than Gen Z slang, but it comprises of the usage of ‘[blank]-core’, in which core means a certain aesthetic or atmosphere. ‘Norm’ means ‘normal’. So ‘norm-core’ means that that specific opera house was just a place for regular people to go to. This is an adult who is clearly a generation above me but uses Gen Z slang better than I ever could. And it scares me.
Face your fears
Ok. Maybe ‘scared’ isn’t the word. I’m more baffled and intrigued than anything. Is this woman scrolling Tiktok in her spare time and just seamlessly picking up Gen Z and Alpha slang like it’s nothing? Did she take a crash course on it to better communicate with students? Is she secretly 25 years old and I’m just really bad at gauging ages? I can’t really march up to her and interrogate her about where she’s learning this language, so I guess I’ll never know which statement is true.
But is it really all that baffling? What do I find so perplexing about someone twice my age3 using my generation’s slang? We’ve never trademarked it, and language is a free-flowing commerce, so she by all means has the right to use it as she sees fit.
Maybe it’s the fact that she’s using it so well. That there aren’t any mistakes made. It doesn’t feel like she’s being a try-hard or whatever. It legitimately seems like she has no other words to convey ‘content’ besides the word ‘lore’. And used in a very Gen-Z way, mind you.
But still, my confusion ultimately boils down to my preconceived notions. I view the generations above me as disconnected to my generations’ habits. Someone who is from a generation associated with not knowing how to use Instagram and ending all texts with a full stop despite the passive-aggressive tone it conveys shouldn’t, in my mind, be effortlessly using Gen Z slang. It’s jarring, unnatural, against the order of things. That’s what I’ve been conditioned to think. But in reality, is it ever that serious?
“This generation is doomed,” says the generation that was supposedly doomed by the previous one
Each generation is different, yet they all share the one trait of hating other generations for reasons I cannot fathom. Unless you’re bitter about the earlier generations not caring about the future prospects of the Earth and leaving us to deal with the consequences, then I seriously don’t get the hate. I thought we were all peace and love and stuff.
I’ve tried talking about slang multiple times here and all times I’ve failed at getting my message across that I’ve never hated it, and that all I’m saying is just I don’t want to use that slang PERSONALLY. No relations to hating the generation, it’s just that I’m more comfortable with other vocabulary to express other ideas. And every time I get someone commenting, “I agree with your article, I too hate Gen Alpha and think they’re doomed.”
I’m breaking the paragraph here abruptly because just thinking about the miscommunication makes me mad. And I wonder if it’s just because my writing isn’t clear enough. So maybe I’ll spell it out in block letters:
I DON’T HATE GEN ALPHA NOR MILLENNIAL SLANG. I THINK IT’S PART OF A WIDER TREND FOR ALL GENERATIONS TO GO THROUGH THIS. NO GENERATION IS DOOMED JUST BECAUSE OF A DIFFERENT SYSTEM OF LANGUAGE YOU CAN’T COMPREHEND.
Anyway.
I’m guessing my losing my mind over norm-core may also be because we’ve crossed the boundaries of Gen Z and are moving into Alpha territory. Because it’s amazing for non-Gen Z nor Alpha person to actually use terminology like this seamlessly. And it also goes to show if we all embraced each other’s slang a little more with less judgement of how it’s used to express feelings, then maybe there’d be a lot less intergenerational hate.
Or maybe I’m going to get another comment saying they hate Boomers. Whatever!
I’m only hazarding a guess
Or Meta. Whatever.
Potentially.