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Are you slay? Not if you don’t know this Gen Alpha lingo.
From “mewing” and “slaying” to “sigma” and “rizz,” youngsters’ slang is perplexing parents more than ever before.
“When we had slang there were only a few phrases that we had to keep up with, and you could kind of guess what they meant,” Dallas stay-at-home mom Jen Kim, 38, told The Wall Street Journal.
“This is a whole vocabulary that we’re trying to decode.”
Her niece, a trendy 10-year-old named Avery, said that a gift of colored pencils was very “slay” — which Kim correctly assumed meant “good” — and was appalled that Kim’s husband claimed to have “rizz,” or charisma.
“She gave him a look, like, ‘No, you have no rizz,’ and started putting him down with all of her insults she knew in her toolbox,” Kim recalled, adding that Avery hurled terms at him like “omega,” or “the lowest rate you can get,” per the tween.
Kim, by association, was labeled as “beta,” knocked down a peg from alpha.
“Because I married him, that brought my stock down,” she said.
According to middle school educator Philip Lindsay, there are more than two dozen slang terms that are uttered in his classroom in a given week. Those include “sigma,” or cool; “gyat,” used to express surprise when seeing someone attractive; or “skibidi,” a reference to a viral YouTube video that can mean either good or bad, depending on the context.
The Journal headline also highlighted the term “gigachad,” which describes “an individual who is exceptionally masculine, physically attractive, and muscular,” according to Wikihow, adding that the term is “an idealized version of a ‘chad,’ which is a stereotypically confident and handsome man.” (Think: Greek god.)
Many of the terms — some of which have been banned in certain schools — often have roots in other cultures, originating from African-American and LGBTQ+ communities, experts tell The Journal.
But the proliferation of those phrases has prompted puzzled parents to resort to searching terms they hear their kids casually mention in conversation, such as “mewing,” which was a head-scratcher for Boston mom Cecilia Hermawan, 41.
“I didn’t know what it meant so I had to Google it, and I had to ask my friend Emily to reference check,” she told The Journal, explaining that it is an exercise meant “to enhance your jawline.”
Matt Murray uses Reddit as his primary resource for understanding his teen son, mastering the lingo enough to use it in his daily vernacular, such “sus,” or suspicious. He still can’t seem to figure out what “skibidi” means — the standout term is “nebulous.”
But he admitted he’s given up on trying to understand it.
“It’s kind of like a foreign language,” the 51-year-old, who works in strategy for a San Francisco software company, told The Journal. “I can understand hearing it better than I can speak it.”
As soon as parents master one phrase, it can quickly become obsolete.
Startup founder Carleen Haylett told The Journal that “bruh” was “so September 2024’ish” — now, her 13-year-old son Fletcher doesn’t use it. He’s moved on to the other 50-some slang terms that he favors instead.
At this point, Haylett doesn’t even try to keep up. When Fletcher games on the computer, she tunes it out.
“I put my AirPods in with the noise-canceling so I don’t have to listen to it,” said Haylett, who is based in Costa Rica.
It’s enough to make you feel your age — or older.
Retired divorce attorney Sharon Blanchet, 78, recently had to ask her 17-year-old granddaughter what “homie hopping” meant. The San Diego resident discovered it was slang for an ex-boyfriend going out with one of your friends after a break-up.
“Boy, do I feel old,” she quipped.
