How to Talk to an American Teenager
Created | Updated Apr 6, 2005
Do you agree that it is amazing how many times a day someone will say something and you will be left so confused you'll be forced to just smile and nod or meagerly agree? Many people don’t have a clue as to what many of today's youth are talking about so I'll try to help out however much I can. Cool, sweet, tight, awesome, phat and rad all really mean the same thing: good. Or in some rare cases found in the Midwest "Oh my god, there's a cow that’s going to fall on your car." (Apparently this happens often because that sentence has been shortened considerably.) And as near as I can tell bad means good and "good" means bad, sometimes, but not all the time (and trust me the only time when the meanings are switched is when you think they're not and visa versa). Another common slang term is any reference to the syllable -izzle. Here's one where caution must be used in translating. Many people have speculated about the meaning and proper use of -izzle, but no conclusive evidence has been found to support any claim.
But the main difference between the language of youth and that of the "adult" world is not slang words, it's the interpreted meaning of little, ordinary, usually well meaning words. For example when a parent says to clean something (please note that I'm not wholly sure on the "real" meaning of this word). They probably are envisioning a room that has been vacuumed and organized, not a bed with an extra pile of stuff under it and half a bottle of air freshener floating around. Some cutting edge linguists have speculated that this inconsistency in interpretation is the result of background radiation from cell phones or even possibly holes in the ozone layer interfering with the audio receptors of teenagers.
Another instance where adult-youth communication breaks down, is when the terms early or late appear in a sentence in reference to the time to come home. Arriving late to the average teenager means being somewhere within 12 hours of the arranged time. And getting home early refers to a time between midnight and 6 o'clock am. Whereas 9:00 seems reasonable to someone over the age of 27 and most adults tend to end-up getting pulled over for speeding, road-rage, and killing an innocent bystander if, God forbid, they will be five minutes late to a game.
In the words of some lower lifeforms on the planet (i.e. most people who claim to have played a sport in high school, and whose knuckles hang just above the earth), "dude." A word that seems able to express anything and everything and just goes to show "it's not what you say it's how you say it."
Example:
Teenager 1: "Dude"
Teenager 2: "Dude?"
Teenager 1: "dude"
Teenager 2: "dude!"
Teenager 1: "dude"
Translation:
1: "hey, my name is Joe, I just moved here from Florida."
2: "Hey my name is Joe too, What's it like down in Florida?
1: "Well, in the spring we have tropical, torrential, monsoon flow that disrupts the average individual agrarian system markedly for about two average lunar cycles.
2: "No way sometimes when it rains I go out and dance and sing!"
Do you see the problem some people might have with deciphering the young language?
So the next time one of you runs into someone who is definitely cooler than you, maybe, just maybe, you'll be able to get the D.L. or the Low Down or whatever and not feel like a politician in a rule full of honest people. Forshizzle? "And watch out for that cow!"
