The theory does hold to a certain extent: each of these words was actually coined in the periods when these generations were teenagers. Sociolinguists know that it is young people who are the primary drivers of linguistic innovation. But there are just too many exceptions for the theory to be true. Slang is invariably far older than one imagines. It usually takes years for ‘new’ slang to reach the mainstream. By the time most teenagers are using what they think is new slang, the words have already been around for decades in marginal subcultures where they were invented as ways to bond and to create in-groups and out-groups.

Most current slang originated many years ago in African American English (think bae, boujee, fam, shade, and woke) and found its way to the mainstream via jazz, rap, hip-hop, and social media. Gen Zers would probably be surprised to learn that their words were created not by them but by their parents’ and grandparents’ generation, or even earlier: lit meaning ‘great’ (1914), woke ‘to be aware of discrimination and injustice’ (1962), fam ‘close friend’ (1996), throw shade ‘to express contempt’ (1990), ship and shipping ‘to advocate for romance between two people’ (1990). We might therefore find both a Melbourne teenager and an elderly man in Harlem, a Black neighbourhood of New York, using the same slang.

It is in the realm of social media and texting that our differences in age are most glaring. We saw it with Senator Richard Blumenthal in a recent US Senate investigation into child protection on the internet, when he thought he was being a hard ass by asking Antigone Davis, Facebook’s Global Head of Safety, ‘Will you commit to ending finsta?’ The clip went viral. He had shown that he had no idea of what a finsta (a fake Instagram account used among very close friends, often to express one’s intimate feelings) was. For starters, he used finsta as a mass noun rather than a count noun, and he implied that Facebook’s platform could identify and control the creation of finstas.

We all know how cringeworthy it is when older people try to act or dress younger than their age; they rarely get it right. This extends to the digital space. If an older person tries to present themselves as younger online by using Gen Z slang, they will be caught out by more than just their words – too much punctuation, too many capitals, too many hashtags, too many emoji (and the wrong ones!), too many numbers instead of letters (gr8, 2mrw, l8r are so 1990s).

In digital communication, Gen Zers have devised new social codes and new typographical tones of voice as ways of compensating for the absence of physical voice or body language. Failure to respond immediately to a text may indicate hostility. A full stop at the end of a sentence or after an abbreviation might indicate that the writer is angry with the recipient. All caps are shouty. ~tildes~ and *asterisks* are used for sarcasm, and lol is used to express irony, softening, or passive aggression, with different implications depending on where it occurs in a sentence. There was a time when lol meant ‘lots of love’, but it now means ‘laugh out loud’ or ‘lots of laughs’, as one grandmother discovered when her granddaughter texted to say that the family dog had died, and she innocently responded ‘lol’.

Texting is a minefield, as any parent of a Gen Zer has learned when trying to text okay to their child. Should the message be okay, ok, K, kk, k, or something else? These five responses have come to communicate drastically different things. A response of k. means ‘you’re in big trouble’ for two reasons related to perceived intentionality. First, the letter is lowercase, showing that the sender took time to ‘undo’ the default capitalisation on their phone. Secondly, there is a full stop after the letter. If the sender took extra time to ‘personalise’ the response in this way (by going into the part of the keyboard where the full stop is listed), it must mean that they were not happy. In contrast, kk has a cheerful and positive connotation; it is understood as a quick, low-effort way to soften the curtness of the single letter.

These new social codes are extended to the use of memes, humorous pictures or videos that go viral. As anyone who has learnt another language will attest: humour comes last. Jokes are the most difficult thing to ‘get’ when learning a new language. The equivalent today is learning the language of internet memes. Memes are the new slang. Just as slang is a counter-language that reacts against a standard, so it is with memes. The most popular memes originate within internet subcultures such as Black Twitter, weird twitter, trans twitter, alt-right, or leftbook (leftist-leaning Facebook groups) and are intended to be ‘relatable’ for their own communities, and hence impenetrable to outsiders. No matter how much Gen Z slang an older person can try to learn, nothing will date us like those extra typographical tones of voice and the impenetrable memes of the digital world.