Every generation adopts new slang that every other generation finds mortifying. The 20th century brought us “groovy” and “radical”. Millennials, the first to have their slang largely forged on the internet, gave us “doggo” and “totes”. It is all transient and replaceable: “cool beans” of the 2010s came to describe what “far out” did in the 1960s.
What, then, is the vernacular of Gen Z? “Rizz” (short for “charisma”) has come to mean a kind of sexual charm; “snatched” (physically sculpted, or usually just skinny) comes from African American vernacular English. But more than anything Gen Z language is associated with euphemistic baby talk that has leaped out of TikTok and into young people’s real lexicons: “seggs” (sex), “spicy” (sexual), “unalived” (killed), “the panini” (the pandemic), “cornucopia” (homophobia), “yahtzee” (Nazi), “pew pew” (gun).
This unusual vocabulary arose initially as a way to avoid content filters on social media sites: using “unalived” in lieu of “killed” to talk about, for example, Israeli bombing of Gaza; or even “spicy” in lieu of “sexual” to talk about erotic novels. Otherwise, this kind of content could be flagged or banned. In fact, there has been an explicit move across platforms in the past year to limit content that could even be loosely described as “political”. Content deemed too political could be precluded from algorithmic recommendation. These new terms allowed for serious discussions – around women’s bodies, LGBT+ issues, politics and violence – to take place online without being suppressed. They quickly became ubiquitous on TikTok and Instagram.
Now, though, this baby-ish language shows up in daily speak, deployed in discussions of anything serious or even mildly uncomfortable, generating an emotional distance from the important subjects these words were created to serve. What we are seeing is a mass self-infantilisation.
The phenomenon creates distance between speaker and subject by obscuring what is being said, often draining subjects of their gravity. We know how this happens in media with the passive voice: “Jane was killed by John” rather than “John killed Jane”; “George Floyd died after a policeman kneeled on his neck” rather than “A policeman murdered George Floyd by kneeling on his neck”. Why should we believe “Jane was unalived by John” wouldn’t do the same? In a time of increasing political and social upheaval – and political violence – it is dangerous not just to confuse what is really happening, but to talk so flippantly. Inevitably, this glibness will move beyond speech and inform action.
There is ample evidence that concludes infantilising language informs how we perceive ourselves and the world. The self-infantilisation we see online among Gen Z, and young people in general, isn’t reserved to how they speak. It emerges in their behaviour, too. A young woman shouldn’t treat herself as a grown-up, instead she’s “just a girl”; people in their twenties and thirties have become obsessed with buying stuffed animals marketed for children. You can go to “kidulting” centres where people of this demographic can pay to play with toys and participate in adult-sized soft play. Twee-isms are everywhere: doing basic tasks, such as laundry or paying bills, isn’t just getting on with the mundane parts of life, it’s the overwhelming, incredibly difficult challenge of “adulting”.
All of this together has trended towards a sheltered world-view. It doesn’t feel like a coincidence that there is a conservatism among Gen Z around what might be deemed “uncomfortable subjects”. There is a hypersensitivity and negativity around casual sex, with many Zoomers also professing uneasiness around sex scenes in films (there’s a new trend in which people openly cringe and laugh at these and other intensely emotional scenes at the cinema). This self-infantilisation also has a gender bias: women are more often than not being framed – and framing themselves and each other – as fundamentally helpless, aligning with the backlash to feminism we have seen developing among younger demographics over the last few years. It bleeds into how we talk about politics explicitly too: there is a whole content vertical on TikTok dedicated to “girlsplaining” complex geopolitical conflicts, on which things such as “Irish history” or the relationship between Israel and Palestine are equated to two women trying to host their birthday party at the same nightclub.
It’s easier to conclude there are no real consequences to this new jargon than to interrogate the ways it is already bleeding into the behaviour and attitude of young people. It doesn’t help that so much of the language is overtly silly, demanding a lax response. It asks not to be taken seriously. But if so many young people can’t explicitly say the name of the subjects they are talking about, should we somehow expect them to be able to contend meaningfully with the normal parts of life they describe, let alone more complicated ones?
This lack of seriousness won’t just be reserved for the words themselves, but will skew how swathes of a generation approach topics that need our attention more than they ever have. If our language doesn’t rise to meet the gravity of these subjects, we stand to lose much more than just the last generation’s outdated terminology.
[See more: The unbearable weight of the literary cannon]
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