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This is helpful. I now understand what younger co-workers mean when they talk.
No cap this is wiggity wack
Wow. A *lot* of these are far older than Gen Z. Like "tea", among others.

And it's not "af" like ahf, it's "A. F."; and "As. F".

This reminds me a bit of those Parenting magazines that got like half the slang or origins wrong

It's not saying the slang originated there, so much as it is slang that is used by gen Z.
Several of them do say that the slang originated in Gen Z
But the "tea" one, which the parent comment mentions, is described as originating in the 90s. So it's not really a valid example.
Related to your parenting magazine comparison: the evergreen hoax, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grunge_speak#Grunge_speak_word...

My bona fide Gen Z son does not allow me to use any of the words in OP, especially not in front of his friends.

Hey son, you and your fellows are looking full drip, no cap. Remember to be back in time for dinner, your mom is making pork chops, and it is going to be bussing bussing af.
TIL that there’s someone in the world who spends the time to type af or asf with caps and periods. L.O.L.
It's kinda crazy how confident they are about it too.
The one that surprised me was yap. I’ve heard that used frequently by at least four generations. Did it fall out of use such that it could repopularized recently?
As a member of gen z, I have no idea what most of these mean. I won’t bother learning them. By the time I can memorize 5 or 6, they’ve probably already moved on to even more indecipherable abbreviations and random words
Many of them have been valid for years. I was surprised things like lit and af were considered gen z. The vocabulary is not moving that fast fortunately.
Yeah. Late 1980s I had a girlfriend from California who used "ick" all the time. So I think the TV show referenced as an origin was just picking up a word that was already out there.
not so based are you, blud?? /s
I always assumed "no cap" was short for "no capitulation" which originally was used to mean something like, "this is what I really believe, without altering my views to kowtow to anyone", but has morphed more generally into the less nuanced and more general "no lie".
Nice, never heard an (attempted) explanation for that one before.
High Cappin was pretending to be wealthy.

Shortened to Cappin.

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Heh, asl used to mean something different 20 odd years ago. I also like using "based" quite often, especially to agree with something controversial which is primarily how I've seen it used. The linked article to -ussy is also hilarious.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/-ussy

just because some terms became mainstream doesn't mean the current young generation of the day gets credit as their slang..... Gaslighting, Gatekeeping and even Ghosting I'm sure were terms used in certain professional realms like therapy etc before Gen Z was kicking them about. They're not even used as 'slang', they're just ...words that people use and apply, because they're mainstream now.

Ultimately these kinds of things are what drives me crazy about Gen Z is their ephemeral disdain for history or context, existing only in the now.

> what drives me crazy about Gen Z is their ephemeral disdain for history or context, existing only in the now.

That's not Gen Z, that's "the youth today" at any point in history.

Unless there was a generation noted for hanging out on street corners trading unexpurgated copies of Gibbon's Decline and Fall.. ?

nah it's not the same now. Others previously of course were 'we're doing our thing and we're the freshest' - but we knew of or about what came before. We knew there was a reason how we got here. In many cases like music etc we were actually very interested in the elders and history!

Now it's "this is the thing currently" and it might as well have just appeared out of thin air, no context, no past, and not really any future either, only right now, and with fleeting attention spans, gone in a short while also. (like the example elsewhere in here about not learning the slang because it'll be gone in a second anyways) And that leads to trends being appropriated, copied, absorbed like it's nothing. And then forgotten. It's cultureless.

Not only that but nowadays they also no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.
At least they no longer treat the servants rudely when trying to foist off sub-standard copper on them...
You almost had me with the first sentence, not gunna lie... Oh the irony of the above comment.
How does this kind of article get allowed by Wikipedia anyway? Wiki editors are ok with pages being used as a concise edition of Urban Dictionary? heh
Came looking for "spicy", was disappointed

Gen Z vernacular usage of "spicy" is one of those difficult idioms to pin down/describe but not that difficult to understand, so I was curious about a wikipedia list's take on it

It's wide ranging. For example, when I was diagnosed with one of those things that requires a hematologist I told the receptionist jokingly: "I got the spicy diagnosis"
Yea like I've heard everything from "neurospicy" to describe neurodivergences to "spicy autocomplete" to describe GPT. My best shot at a concise usage definition is that it's like an especially flippant way to say "special" or "different" but there are places where that would fall apart

You also sometimes get it having a connotation of sexuality but that actually seems like a holdover of an older (maybe millenial?) idiomatic usage of the word

I've heard several people my age (early 40s, but generally pretty young at heart I guess) refer to covid as spicy cough.

In context it made sense the first time they said it, out of context I'd probably have had no idea what they meant.

Basically 85% African American slang.
(Mrs. Cleaver raises hand) I speak Jive...
like any US-centric youth culture since (at least) the Beats?
As someone over 40, I probably enjoy too much the ability to destroy any exclusivity or sense of cool these words may have previously held to the younger generation by using them excessively in their presence.
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I am clearly not hip to the scene.
“I used to be with ‘it’, but then they changed what ‘it’ was. Now what I’m with isn’t ‘it’ anymore and what’s ‘it’ seems weird and scary. It’ll happen to you!“
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Is this an already dead language, then?