How old are we when we stop liking language change?

As you may have heard, the youths are destroying everything. They’re not getting married enough, they’re not buying homes enough and they’re weirdly obsessed with avocados. Of course, young people have been destroying things for centuries. Every generation complains about the generation after it; it’s just a fact of life. And one thing that has been a major source of ire for time immemorial is language.

Young people are the drivers of language change. They invent new terms, and they’re far more accepting of lexical weirdness. Studies have shown that as people go from their 20s to their 30s and on, they become more linguistically conservative. Young people will always use slang old people hate.

A new (albeit informal) study from The Chronicle of Higher Education tells a slightly different story, however. Author Rose Jacobs wanted to see if people became less tolerant of language change as they got older, and did so by asking over 200 people how much they disapproved of certain phrases. The phrases chosen were representative of various decades:

• “I slept through the reveal.” (reveal as a noun — 1950s)
• “Could you please xerox this?” (brand name Xerox as a verb — 1960s)
• “The results will impact our decision.” (impact as a verb — 1970s)
• “I’m trying to develop my skillset.” (compound noun skillset — 1980s)
• “My omelet morphed into a scramble.” (morph as a verb outside the context of computer animation — 1990s)
• “Did he medal?” (medal as a verb — 2000s)
• “I’m lowkey annoyed by her response.” (lowkey/low-key as an adverb—2010s)

Jacobs’ hypothesis was that the younger someone was, the more they would approve of the phrases that were being used. If people really grew more conservative with language, they would be more annoyed by the phrases that entered the lexicon after they were in their 20s. This is not what happened, however. The only phrase that showed a clear direct correlation between age and disapproval was the 2010s lowkey phrase. In fact, none of the other phrases raised much ire at all.

So do people not become more linguistically conservative as they get older? That would go against previous research, and also, it’s probably not true. Because of the limitations of this study, we can’t read too much into it, but there are a couple possible takeaways. One is that the specific examples chosen have an effect on how annoyed people are (maybe xerox as a verb is just less annoying than lowkey as an adverb). To check that, however, we would need to study a lot more phrases.

Another explanation, which seems even more likely, is that while people love to complain a bunch about every single language change, they stop caring after a while. Even though the use of impact as a verb caused a flurry of angry editorials in the ’70s, the word was used enough that people stopped hating it quite as much. This would explain why lowkey is the only one that really annoyed people. And this would also confirm that being older makes you more conservative about language, because the data showed that the older someone is, the more they disapproved of lowkey.

Again, it would be better to study this topic more, but at the least, this poll provides some interesting insights into people’s attitudes toward language today. If there’s one thing we can definitely take away from this, it’s that people should chill out about language change.