And now, in my old age (I’m 27), I’m discovering the delight of actually seeing it happen in front of my eyes.
The News has added some wonderful, intelligent, wide-eyed and bushy-tailed 18- and 19-year-old cadets in the past six months, who also happen to speak another language.
They keep speaking about “rizz” and telling me to “slay king”, and telling me to “take the L”, which apparently means they want to “ship” the concept of shutting up with me?
I never learned to speak Youth — I was never cool enough to get invited to classes and spent all my time playing downball, and now, as I enter my twilight years (my 30s), this dog is too old to learn new tricks.
I learned most of my language from my father, and his tendency to sit me down in front of the TV while he was cooking dinner to shut me up.
A childhood staple of mine, a 6pm viewing of The Simpsons on Channel 10 (other channels are available), developed a wonderful appreciation of perfectly cromulent words.
Throw in some Goodies and Blackadder, and a heaping of the animated Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series and hanging out with my father — a complete dork (love you, Dad) — permanently warped my sense of language into a dialect that no longer exists, and in fact may never have existed.
And I’ve pulled it out as a defence mechanism, my own version of shouting “I’m not owned, I’m not owned” as I slowly shrink into a corn cob in the main room of the retirement village.
For every time I get told we “stan” something or it “goes hard”, I get more and more obtuse and obscure with my weird mash of ye olde slang, yo.
It’s grouse, dear reader. Or should I call you “home slice”?
Because what’s hip and happening and — dare I say it, crackalakin — is that when the turkeys start jiving me, I’ve just gotta get groovy.
And that’s how I roll — if you can’t figure out what I’m saying, how are you going to make fun of me? (Don’t answer that.)
Say sayonara to “yeet” and hola to using words that people have heard before in isolation, but not in this particular pumpernickel.
Throw in un petit peu of a different language to sound S-M-R-T and some out-of-place sayings and you’re really buttering my biscuit there, partner! You’re ying-ing my yang.
I’m unbothered. Moisturised. Happy. In my lane. Focused. Flourishing.
The true cherry on top is the adoption of the old-fashioned dad joke, and ratcheting it up to 11.
I’m not going to settle for someone pointing at a bee and my response being “bee afraid” when I can twist the knife and scream “bee-elete that bug”, which is a far worse joke — thus making it far bee-tter at bee-ing extreme-b(l)ee annoying (this also works in text form).
Why stop with “hi hungry, I’m Max” when you can say “Hi getting really annoyed at you making the ‘hi blank, I’m Max’ jokes whenever I say ‘I am’ something, can you please stop, I’m Max”?
“Hi going to HR, I’m Max.”
“Hi fired, you’re Max. Wait, what? Ah. Oh dear.”
