Diary of a Gen Z student: I feel like I’m speaking an entirely different language in front of my parents

Our resident youngster points out how to devour — and how to give her generation the ick

Trinity College student and Irish Examiner columnist Jane Cowan photographed at her home in Dunshaughlin, County Meath. Photo:Barry Cronin

Shakespeare’s Macbeth is where the phrase ‘one fell swoop’ was coined. Shakespeare didn’t just write plays and sonnets; he was into falconry, too. His hobby inspired the phrase. And that phrase is still used today. That’s how language functions, always evolving.

In 2024, we’re still doing the same thing. It may not be Shakespeare, but Gen Z slang certainly bleeds out into the lexicon of other generations too. Our slang moves quickly. Trying to discern what’s ‘in’ and ‘out’ is no small task. My Gen X father, for instance, loves to talk about ‘slaying the day’. The wincing reaction I give him fails to prevent him from using such an out of date phrase. ‘Slaying’ was cool for approximately 34 minutes last summer, Dad. Get with the programme.

People like to say that nothing good comes out of TikTok and Instagram. Allow me to disagree. 

The slang that comes from social media is an excellent means of communication. It moves quick, but so do the young people that use it. ‘Slaying’ might be out, but it’s been replaced by the equally useful term ‘eating’. If my friend looks particularly good, I’ll tell her that she’s ‘eating’. We use it in the past tense too — ‘she ate that dress’. It’s also possible to ‘devour’, if ‘eating’ doesn’t feel like it goes far enough. I recently told my friend that her makeup ‘ate’, while my mother was in the room. I could see the combination of concern and confusion on her face.

I feel like I’m speaking an entirely different language in front of my parents sometimes. I try to explain our lexicon to them in terms they can grasp. When I was in the midst of hangover recovery a few weeks ago, my head in my hands, as my dad slid paracetamol across the kitchen table, I told him I was absolutely ‘hanging’ — that phrase he got. Then he asked me if the night out was worth the hangover. ‘Ah it was kind of mid’. His raised eyebrow signalling that I needed to describe the term ‘mid’.

So, I told him we had decided to go to Copper’s. Copper’s being a Dublin institution for nightlife, he understood the meaning of mid fairly quickly. As nightclubs go, it’s probably average, or slightly below. It gets the job done, but you’ll probably walk away from that dance floor with whatever unique disease it is that thrives off the mix of guards, nurses, students, sambuca and Westlife. Anyone that’s been inside that sweat fest knows all about the word ‘mid’.

Actually, a lot of our slang comes in handy on a night out. The guy trying to chat you up at the bar? He’s ‘rizzing’ you up.

But the ripped skinny jeans he’s wearing will probably give you the ‘ick’. No amount of ‘rizz’ can outweigh the ‘ick’ induced by ripped skinny jeans. The skinny jeans might be a ‘red flag’. But don’t neglect the ‘beige flags’. He orders a cocktail in the club? Probably a ‘beige flag’. Not a deal breaker, but important to note, none the less.

Even the stages of the night out have names. Before leaving for said night out, we always gather in an unkempt student accommodation kitchen for ‘pres’ (pre drinks). It’s our warm up.

Then we go to the club. And when we want to keep the party going, everyone goes to ‘afters’ in some other squalid flat. ‘Afters’ is, put candidly, where dreams go to die, where the night out seeps into the next day.

The time you should spend ‘hanging’ is put off until the marrow has been drained from the bone of that night out. If we’re honest with ourselves, the ‘afters’ never even achieves the status of ‘mid’. Nothing good happens in Copper’s, and certainly not afterwards either.

Our slang may not be Shakespeare, but it does penetrate far beyond the world of TikTok, for a short time at least. That’s got to count for something. You’ve got to be sharp to keep up with it all. I’m sure I’ll feel outpaced by it when the younger generations take over. But for now I can ‘devour’ on a night out, be ‘rizzed’ up, and go to a ‘mid’ nightclub, in ‘one fell swoop’. 

If you listen closely, I think you might just hear Shakespeare turn in his grave for that one.