"The undiscovered country, from whose bournNo traveller returns, puzzles the will."
There is a generation gap.
Some of my readers will see the quotation above and recognize it from Shakespeare's famous "To be or not to be" speech spoken by Hamlet. I have it wrong. In Shakespeare the undiscovered country is death, not youth. But no one returns to youth, either, and I find youth remote and puzzling, so I used it instead of song lyrics from the 1960s.
Bits of Shakespeare are part of the common culture of most Americans. The Bible, too, is part of common culture, although Trump showed the limitations of that when he claimed to love "Two Corinthians." Shakespeare and the Bible are unifying fragments of the American canon -- the common core of our culture. Slang language is the changing frontier of it. It isn't the 1960s anymore, but I am trying to understand young people. This is a political blog and young people vote.
I read something by Monica Lewinsky this week. She is 50 years old now. Fifty! She wrote "IYKYK" as if people would know what that meant.
Do you know what IYKYK means? I didn't. It means "If you know, you know." It is used the way I have used the phrase "You had to be there." IYKYK means that one needs to be inside the loop to understand.
Even my oldest readers know that FYI means For Your Information and FAQ means Frequently Asked Questions. Those initials are part of common culture. We are all in that loop.
The following are less common but still likely to be written without explanation in the mainstream media.
MSN That is the abbreviation for that mainstream media, e.g. New York Times.
SEO means search engine optimization.
ETF means exchange traded fund. Investors know what it means.
YOLO That means you only live once, so so take the risk. The financial media used this abbreviation to explain why people were making wildly speculative investments in bitcoin and NFTs.
NFTs are non-fungible tokens, i.e. unique copies of images.
UX means User Experience in a computer setting.
The next group of abbreviations are part of the half-secret language of a generation. It is code that defines and congeals its tribe members. They are in the loop.
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| The all-digital generation |
TL;DR means "Too Long; Didn't Read."
LOL means Laugh Out Loud. LMAO means Laughing My Ass Off. ROFLMAO means Rolling On The Floor Laughing My Ass Off.
IMHO means In My Humble Opinion.
WTF means What the Fuck.
DK means Don't Know.
K means OK.
HMU means Hit Me Up.
IRL means In Real Life.
BRB means Be Right Back
OMW means On My Way.
F2F means Face to Face.
MOS means Mom Over Shoulder. It is a head's up to the recipient that the person they are texting doesn't have privacy.
I have discovered some words used in a way new to me. "Boojie" is slang for something bourgeois. "Cringe" means something embarrassing or cringeworthy. "Rizz" is short for charisma, meaning one has "game," i.e. confidence and attractiveness.Note: If a reader my age needs to look up these and other definitions, it confirms that this is a kind of "foreign language." That is my point. A special half-secret language is a way to define one's generation as separate and different. Here are some links:
7 comments:
I'm afraid President Biden caps just a bit too much, or else his supporters/ enablers do--about President Biden's accomplishments, his presence of mind, etc. It's hard to understand why supporting President Biden would be important for the good of America. Why is Anthony Blinken, not President Biden, the one meeting with the president of Mexico? Maybe it"s because President Biden can't handle it, or Mexico and points south are just sh--hole countries in the first place. Trump's capping is a given, to the point it doesn't hurt him any more than it already has; the damage is done, in other words, and it cannot get any worse for him. Negative campaigning suppresses voting; that helps Trump, and in this regard it makes sense that he would tell people to "Go to hell" on Christmas, so that everyone who doesn't support him will stay home on election day. It's easy for young people to not vote; statistics bear this out election after election. No cap.
Far out, man. Out of sight! I get the bag you’re in. Trump’s a bummer and Biden’s out of it.
Dope will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope.
Don’t trust anyone over 30!
This is the sunset of The Age Of Aquarius… 😱😀
You don’t have to understand their lingo to win the youth vote. You just have to offer them something worth voting for. In my youth, ending the Vietnam war was worth it. Now it’s the very world we’re leaving them.
IMHO the youth DGAS whether a candidate knows their acronyms. Polls show that, like anybody with a clue, they care about affordable housing, education and healthcare, abortion, gun violence and the environment. Since the problems just keep getting worse, promises to address them are hard to believe.
Peter it's pretty sus that you left "sus" off your list. But I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and guess that maybe you were cross fading at an AYCD ABC dayger yesterday so maybe you were off your game.
Peter - Thanks for the up date.
Who reads other than their cell phone? Everything is background noise except what I am looking at on my cell phone.
I text therefore I am. I stream what I feel therefore I am free. I refuse therefore I chose. Got liberty. It’s all reverse discrimination.
No vote counts, look at the outcome I still have a $20.00 an hour job. I read the part where you mark the boxes and threw it away.if they try to draft me I am gone. It’s all ok, sometimes it’s f@##$ked. I’m ok. See ya.
Brother man Peter: you left out the one that all of us in our age cohort enjoy the most, when we're looking to replace the vitamins and supplements and stomach settlers and laxatives that most of us take: BOGO (BuyOne Get One...free or 50% off)
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