I’m Finna Yeet My Cheugy
An Old Man Enjoys Gen X Slang
Hey, gang — there’s a new clipping in town! And it’s the Oxford University Press word of the year!
The word is “rizz” — both a noun — attractiveness — or a combining verb as in using charisma to attract someone (to “rizz up” a person). And it’s a rare middle clipping!
Okay, I’ll back up here. A clipping is a word created by lopping off the front (bot from robot, roach from cockroach, phone from telephone), the back (auto from automobile, memo from memorandum, pen from penitentiary), or front and back (flu from influenza) of a longer word.
So rizz is a middle clipping. Cool! Rad! Ginchy! Boss! Phat! And other outdated slang words!
Okay, I’ll back up here. As a writer and teacher of writing, I’ve always loved words and how language grows and changes. As a very old man (shuffling my way to octogenarian) I’ve seen many slang expressions come and go, and I love Gen-Z slang!
Slang words and expressions are the street urchins of language — terse, coarse, colorful. They are scorned and despised by “nice people” and incomprehensible to anyone not “in” on them.
Many slang words disappear quickly, and some become permanent. Examples from the 1940s — nobody these days calls a good dancer a “ducky shincracker” or a bald guy a “chrome dome”, but we still call a coward “chicken” and an old person (like me) a “geezer.”
Slang often begins as a private language of a group, so Gen-Z slang baffles anyone older than G-Zers. But I find it breezy, delightfully disrespectful, and original. Plus the Gen-Zers are using tried and true linguistic methods to coin their words. A few of my favorites:
Salty. This has long been a slang word for racy or coarse (i.e., cuss words) but for Gen-Z it means bitter or irritated. No idea why. Maybe they’ll repurpose bitter to mean racy or coarse!
Flex — to show off or boast. In the sense of showing off your muscles, the word has been around for a long time, but now it means to show off about anything. So it’s an example of “generalization” — where a word takes on a more — i.e. general — meaning. So Gen-Zers are “flexing” their linguistic muscles!
Stan — a die-hard fan or supporter of someone or something. Possibly a combination of “stalker” and “fan.” If so, then the Gen-Zers have created a portmanteau word — a mash-up of two words, such as “smog” from smoke + fog.
Cheugy — a putdown of lifestyle trends associated with the early 2010s (at least they’re not going after the Boomers this time). The opposite of trendy or trying too hard. This word is a neologism — a new coinage, a word not derived from any existing word. This is a big deal in linguistics because it happens rarely.
Finna. A contraction of the phrase “fixing to,” which means getting ready to do something. This is interesting because “fixing to” or “fixin’ to” is Southern dialect, itself regional slang.
Boujee — used to describe someone who is fancy and likes extravagant things. Probably derived from the “bourgeoisie” —people with middle-class materialistic values. So a slang word from a foreign word. Nice!
FOMO is also, according to some sources, a Gen-Z word, an acronym for Fear Of Missing Out.
As you probably know (but being a teacher I’ll explain it anyway) an acronym is an abbreviation formed from the initial letters of other words and pronounced as a word, such as NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) or LASER (Light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation). How’s that for useless trivia!!
There seems to be a “thing” of making acronyms with “O” as the second and fourth letters — BOGO (Buy One, Get One Free), BOLO (Be On The Lookout), or SOHO (South of Houston Street in Lower Manhattan).
Then there’s Yeet (hollered when doing something risky or throwing an item very hard) which is The Gen Z version of YOLO (you only live once) — another double O acronym!
As Gen-Z slang is seen more by the general public (newspapers, magazines, and talk shows), the salty Gen-Zers will say “I’m finna get some new words.” Once Gen Y-ers (and — gasp — Gen X-ers) are using Gen-Z slang, it’s lost its usefulness for Gen-Z.
This happens often when slang is appropriated by “out” groups. For example, whites appropriated “bling,” “I feel you” and — notoriously — “woke” from the Black community.
Meanwhile, I think that Gen-Z slang is lit, but as a—is there a Gen-Z word for “old guy?”—I know enough not to go around flexing it!
