A Note From the Office Millennial
Kids these days, am I right? Where do they get off changing the sacred English language with their generationally specific terms? After all, we all know that language hasn’t evolved since the beginning of time. That’s why we’ve all been communicating via crudely drawn cave paintings and putting an “e” at the end of “old” up until this exact moment in history.
If you’re having trouble talking to the millennials in your office, home or local coffeeshop, don’t worry! The internet is really obsessed with helping you understand our indecipherable gibberish.
I’m baffled. Is this really that big of an issue? Older generations, are you really struggling that much to discern and appropriately parrot what we’re saying? Also, why do y’all care so much? I’m beginning to suspect there’s some insidious Baby Boomer plot at work here. Not sure what exactly that plot is...perhaps it involves sticking us with tons of student debt we had to accrue in an attempt to enter a saturated job market short on decent jobs and forcing us to pay for their retirement and benefits with no hope of seeing the same? (Nah, I’m not #salty.)
As a millennial by every measurement of the demographic, I do feel duty-bound to inform any Baby Boomers or Gen Xers reading these articles that half of these words and terms are foreign to me. Also, these article headlines are giving much so much secondhand embarrassment, to say nothing of the “explanations” of the slang itself. Sure, they’re not Hillary-referencing-Beyoncé-in-a-desperate-attempt-to pander-to-youth voters-level embarrassing, but I’m cringing all the same.
What baffles me is the implied lack of any capability on the part of non-millennials to use context clues. If I tell you “I’m trying get a good pic for Instagram”, can you not infer that I’m doing something involving a social media application? When you see someone refer to someone/thing as “bae” accompanied by the heart eyes emoji, doesn’t it stand to reason that bae is some term of endearment? Even if you don’t know what I mean when I say I’m salty, surely my tone or general demeanor indicates that “salty” means I’m somehow displeased? (Used in a sentence: I’m salty that there are so many inane articles about decoding “millennial speak” when it’s honestly not that hard to figure out what we’re talking about.)
Another thing that seems to be lost on the authors of these articles is that a lot of millennials use a lot of these terms somewhat ironically. For example, I would not say “Oh my God I am gonna get so turnt tonight” while actually talking about my plans for a night of drinking, but I might say it while talking about my plans to eat five cookies and go to bed at 9. Another thing I might say: “Let’s get turnt for Jesus!” Hilarious and blasphemous. What I’m getting at here is that “turnt” on its own is not a funny joke, but it’s the kind of word I’d only use when making some sort of mildly humorous comment.
Yes, there are millennials among us who not only would use turnt unironically in a casual setting, but also think it’s appropriate for a professional setting. But since I don’t judge all Baby Boomers for the sins of a single one of them who can’t figure out how to stop sending their Slack messages to the entire company, I in turn expect that no dumbassery of someone who just happens to be my approximate age is automatically held against me.
Key takeaways—or, as we millennials might say, the tl;dr—for the old and crusty (and the old and crusty at heart):
Use context clues to understand the meaning of generational slang.
“Bitz” is not a hot millennial word just because an article on the internet says it is.
If using a certain term or phrase feels uncomfortable, you’re probably making the Youths uncomfortable by using it.
There. Now cool it with articles, rest of the internet.