By Andy Burrel

‘Am I speaking your language?’

 

You will never find a generation that doesn’t take offence at the way their kids bastardise their language. And so it’s been since the dawn of time. Whoops, I just used ‘and’ at the beginning of a sentence. Did you like that? Did you?

 

Every generation develops its own secret language. Slang is part of our identity and its as irritating to our parents as it is liberating to us. We all think ours is the proper way of doing things.

 

I’m 31 and after a couple of months of being on our class group chat it transpired that there was general agreement amongst my cohort that I was coming across as quite aggressive. Not a reputation you want. But not because I was rapacious in the studio. Not because I would use my big frame to push into the microwave queue. No. My crime? I use full stops at the end of my messages.

 

Hadaway and shite.

 

I just don’t like to leave my words hanging in the air like a fart in a lift. It’s wrong on so many levels. Why would you write a whole message with excellent grammar, only to leave the final sentence as ambiguous as a Brexit Party manifesto?

 

Now I’m no spring chicken, and nothing compounds that fact more than being at SCA amongst a bunch of people who were still wetting the bed when I was…well…also wetting the bed. But that’s because I was a pissed underage drinker, not a a nappy-clad toddler.

 

The cavernous gap in age between me and a few of the younger guys has, at times, caught me out and left me nodding along to conversations when really I haven’t got the foggiest idea what they’re talking about.

 

Here’s a few words I hear often and what I assume they mean:

 

Wavy – Usually paired with garms ie. those are some wavy garms. Now, I’ve worked out garms. That’s just short for garments. I’m not an idiot. But wavy? I’m assuming it refers to material and its relative corrugation. Like, the more crimped the fabric the more wavy it is. I imagine something like Seersucker would be classed as extremely ‘wavy’. Silk, with its buttery smoothness, can never be wavy.

 

Peng – That’s a place in South London, right?

 

Woke – Verb. Past tense. I was asleep and then I wasn’t. Because I woke.

 

Fomo – If we don’t stop the rise of extreme right wing sentiment we can get ready for fomo years of Trump.

 

FML – Short for female. Ironic as it actually takes more syllables to say it.

 

WTF – Why the face?

 

Bloody words. Lovely things aren’t they? Glorious and ridiculous all at the same time.

 

Never change. Never stop changing.