“Do you know what a trunk call is?” I asked the younger man in my house. With a bored look, he said, “Some weird kind of a call”. Well if he thought the technology was odd, his reply was equally vague. He sounded clueless.
My husband and I spent a good couple of minutes explaining how in the past long distance calls within the country had to be arranged through the post and telegraph department. The operator would connect both parties. At times, it was a long wait, and the line would get snapped off in the middle of a conversation. One would literally beg to be reconnected.
My boy was pretty surprised to hear how different things were then. Why would he not be when within seconds he can talk to anyone across the globe? Growing up with the Internet, Wi-Fi, cable television, and other fruits of technology, it is difficult for him to comprehend or visualize.
Forget the trunk call era; the world on all fronts is galloping along at an unbelievably fast rate. You cannot predict when something that you are using on a daily basis will go obsolete. Changes have been occurring even in the way people talk. Keeping pace with the language that Gen Z (those born between the mid-to-late 1990s and the early 2010s) and young adults speak has become a challenging task! I sometimes feel that I am several centuries behind.
Short and sweet or confusing and annoying?
Always in a rush, there is no time to explain in detail. A mom was rather upset about a message from her twenty-five-year-old daughter. It read:
“NGL I am clueless. TBH IDK when is the party. LMK, TTYL”
She said she had to search on Google to make sense of the text. It translated to: “Not gonna lie, I am clueless. To be honest, I don’t know when is the party. Let me know. Talk to you later!”
May I also add something else? You need to learn emojis well to understand and carry out a smooth online conversation. Many times, they replace words to convey a thought or emotion.
Belonging to the old school, my father corrected us whenever we said “thanks” and “congrats” to someone. He said that the feeling did not sound sincere with the shortened versions and that we were supposed to say a proper “thank you” or “congratulations”.
I believe that the reaction from a Gen Z-er to such a piece of advice would be “LOL” ( Laugh Out Loud)!
Want to master the complete list of Gen Z lingo? Impossible!
You will need more than a lifetime to fully educate yourself in the vocabulary of Gen Z. Here are some examples.
- Ghosting has nothing to do with demons and goblins. It refers to the phenomenon in which someone has suddenly stopped texting you or has been avoiding your calls.
- Hold your breath! Salty has no connection with a dish being served, but rather it is a word to express how one is being agitated, angry, or upset.
- “No cap” does not mean that the head is bare. It means that one is being authentic or truthful because cap means to lie.
Memes and their magic!
The popularity of memes among Gen Z is amazing. Going by the dictionary definition, a meme is “an image, video, piece of text, etc, typically humorous in nature, that is copied and spread rapidly by internet users, often with slight variations”.
Embracing personal, social, and political dimensions, a meme is perceived to be more emotional than a text message. Basically anything can be a meme if there is a message or meaning behind it that is recognizable and identifiable. So there is a chance that you might feel like a fish out of water if you do not understand the memes that youngsters circulate.
Go with the flow
Yes it can be annoying not being on the same page with someone that you have to interact with. But do you have a choice?
The only thing that is constant in life is change. So whether you like it or not, you need to acknowledge the existence of everything that you think is alien and incohesive and simply move on. Love them or hate them, but you cannot ignore what Gen Z youth do or say. So just calm down and relax, or as the youngster in my family says: chillax!!!
rashmi writes 