I have embraced the fact that I'm four decades old, and I find it to be quite an astonishing accomplishment on my part. Must say I'm proud of my mom for not killing me when she would have been perfectly justified to do so. I don't spend a lot of time reflecting on woulda, coulda, and/or shoulda. I teach English and just used those last three expressions as actual words; forgive me. If a human had survived as long as my career, she or he'd be 19 years old and counting. Within those nineteen years, I've noticed a change in the adolescent vernacular surrounding my desk top Disney characters and me. Necessity fosters invention, and perhaps invention fosters our vocabulary. Nevertheless, many of these words have been snuggled up in the pages with Mr. Webster, and they have become popular ramblings of the generation whose thumbs will be more agile than all the digits of Mozart combined. Whether their embrace has formed from texting, social networking, or just using something new....take note of how often these words are thrown about by your tweens at home. Back in our day, we just didn't say these words."random" - I remember using it in Mrs. Rutherford's biology class...maybe...something to do with selection and a Petri dish. Tweens use it today to describe little mini-surprises throughout their days, and they use "random" often. I can't decide if the connotation of its new use is negative or positive. What are your experiences with the word?
"beast" - Once upon a road trip, Bridgette and I rode a roller coaster with that name. Today, the cool kids use it to describe encounters or individuals that are above average, or, dare I say, distinguished.
"like" - Our generation used this to refer to how we felt about Clancy's cheeseburgers, roller skate pom poms with jingle bells in their center, Friday Night Videos, and Wiggles blue jeans from the Little Loft. Today, the Bieber generation can seldom speak a sentence without inserting this new form of an unnecessary comma. Omitting its use from their daily discussions would be the equivalent of tying my hands behind my back while I speak. They nor I would manage to communicate very effectively under either circumstance.
"epic" - For us, this described the torture we knew as Homer and the Iliad, and even the Odyssey. Based on today's standards of usage, we should have been using it for the number of Tuesday nights we spent standing in line to buy Top Gun tickets on cheap night at the movies.
"hoodie" - We wore them, but we didn't call them that. I remember, as do many of you, those faded out MHS hooded sweatshirts that rarely maintained a chord through the actual hood. Washers and dryers across our small town devoured the strings along with socks and underwear, so the hoods were left to lie flat on our backs. Sometimes we wore them on test day. Those hoods were excellent hiding places for cheat sheets. Did I just write that? Nah.
"180, 360, 540, 720" - Visualize if you will a math teacher, any math teacher, trying to teach us about how to find the circumference of a circle. Today, kids know all about how many revolutions of a skateboard or MX bike each number represents. We talked in terms of fast, faster, and fastest; they talk in terms of complete revolutions.
"goth" - Upon first impression, that's a term that looks like it might be the name of a bottom dwelling fish, but it's a term used today to describe kids who wear black at every possible opportunity. Black hair, pale skin, black makeup, black clothes, and black shoes. Back when we were kids, we had another word for "goth." We called him Ozzy.
"bank" - I remember the steps inside the lobby of Home Federal that allowed me to climb up and look the teller in the face when I was a curtain climber making my deposit into Homer's Club. My money was kept in a building called a bank. Today, "bank" is used by tweens to describe the monetary possessions of a celebrity.
"stalker" - Maybe when we were teens this word was surfacing with news "reports" published by the National Enquirer but I don't recall us using it as a term to describe people just for being annoying and refusing to accept the rejection they had been dealt. Kids today accuse each other of stalking everything from their lockers, their papers, their phones, and their social network pages. Again, I can't tell if the connotation is negative or positive.
My list could go on and on, and one day, it will. But for today, give my selections a thought and share your observations with me, please. I will never be as bright as the children I teach, but it's important that I always know how to interpret their English compared to mine.
Now, for those of you who thought I'd write about adolescent use of profanity based on the title of this rambling, I gotcha! In the words of Dr. Sheldon Cooper, "Bazinga!"
