side note Google is just totally useless now
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This is exactly how I feel as a thirty-six year old. My mom would say “bad vibes” or “good vibes” all the time, so I also grew up saying it. Using it as a verb wasn’t a thing, so that’s what I associate with young people.
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Giving me shocked pikachu face vibes. Will have to reconsider.
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I had to check it out just to see if Google was any better for me here. In fact it just made it worse:
How did it work out that The Beach Boys, possibly THE most American group of all time wrote a song that fell under the genre UK R&B, let alone Children’s Music?
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The children’s song released in 1993:
I’m pickin’ up good vibrations
She’s giving me excitations
I’m pickin’ up good vibrations
She’s giving me excitations
Good, good, good, good vibrations
She’s giving me excitations
Good, good, good, good vibrations
She’s giving me excitationsAh, ah, my my, what elation
I don’t know where but she sends me there
Oh, my my, what a sensation
Oh, my my, what elation
Oh, my my, what
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Shwayze is my age. Here he is vibing with the not at all new and at-the-time on-the-way-out Pontiac Vibe:
GEN X SLANG BELOW ↴ 
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Adding -wagon as a suffix is a vibe. That’s a phat vibewagon.
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My dear friends, we are all forgetting something essential to this discussion. It is true that when a Millennial (a cohort I belong to, to be clear), or someone who is in their 30s or 40s, uses the term “vibe” or “vibes” in certain variations, it can, in certain contexts or usages, come off as cringey or forced. However, there are certainly no hard and fast rules, as the cringe quotient of such a thing is based purely on vibes
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You know, this all hearkens back to other widely contentious nomenclature, the whole generation nomenclature. It’s not nomenclature I necessarily dislike, but, it’s nomenclature that is used in a lot of dislikeable ways.
Millenials are in a strange spot currently, where many of us are inching into if not definitively becoming middle aged, but social forces have left many if not most of us caught in a perpetual state of intellectual and emotional maturity, but economic dependence and underdevelopment.
Perhaps there comes a time in every generation’s life cycle where they feel tugged in three fairly incongruent directions:
- Conservative Heel Turn (aka for Millennials: Boomer Coded Ego Death)
When Daddy’s Money turns you evil. These kinds of traitorous millennials are currently complaining about the smell of cannabis smoke in urban areas within jurisdictions where it has been partially legalised. They heard that odious quote from Churchill about becoming conservative as you age because you have a brain and some part of them interpreted it as a natural law of the universe, rather than a racist drunkard ideologue being a sore winner.
- Inheritors of Previous Generation’s Revolutionary Spirit Gracefully Accepting Having Reached Middle Agedness Without, Societally, Having Accomplished Much Of Anything
Perhaps Millennials are doomed to also fail at bringing about the same kind of countercultural movement that Gen Xers and the Cool Boomers who are still somehow alive once embodied. But, like the remaining oldsters who have not yet given in to their own putrefactional boomerification of their spirits, it would not be very punk rock of us to give up simply because of the futility of it all.
- The First Stage Of The Grief Of Being Of A Generation Is Denial, The Third Is Bargaining
On one hand, it is perfectly understandable to ascribe narc ass vibes to subsections of generational cohorts who try and perform being of the younger generation, because that is a narc ass thing to do. However, I think millennials might not be entirely wrong when succumbing to a bit of generation-wide generational identity crisis, in a way that is perhaps even pretty unique to us, as us being the first generation to widely adopt highly centralized social media platforms also means we were the first generation to be able to communicate and exchange socially and culturally with both so many of our peers, and then later with the generation(s) that came after us. At least, I think that’s possible within the relatively brief time period that these social media platforms stayed so centralized, which seem seem to be fracturing once again due to Enshittification.
I dunno, with half-apologies to @mack41 because you’re doing this (but not actually, I think you’re more just saying people should adopt words and phrases with some amount of self awareness, which I agree with wholeheartedly) but I guess for myself I feel somewhat mystified at the rapid Boomerification of a subset of my age peers. Like, why are certain millennials so terrified of Gen Z slang, like we haven’t spent the last decade cycling through our own dumb as shit slang words and phrases, and like every 2-4 months, too?
Perhaps my overall statement on the question of hotly contemporaneous slang is that, yeah, to repeat what I think @mack41 was saying at least in general, people who come upon slang as an outsider can perhaps just practice some self awareness, embrace a middle path where you don’t pretend like you’re one of the children just because you can understand and put on airs of belonging to their cultural and social world, but also don’t pretend to be outraged or confused either, kill the part of one’s ego that rejects any cultural evolution of language or ideas that one was not directly involved in.
Most importantly, I think being literate in contemporary slang, yet still aloof from it, aggravates the most petulant of the olds and youths alike. Don’t give boomers the satisfaction of seeing us do what we’re told and act our age, and don’t give zoomers the satisfaction of confusing us with the kind of pseudo cant that only functions as a cant if you just willfully refuse to use the supercomputer you own that fits in the palm of your hand which can also connect to the sum of human knowledge in seconds while taking a shit. I mean, I think that at least a small part of the way the recent burstfire of stupid ass zoomer slang words becoming exposed to a wider audience came about as a sort of intentional omnibus style collection of them, was out of a direct intent to confound the olds. Like, even they admit using “skibidi” as a verb or an adjective doesn’t have any exact or inherent meaning, but if it really doesn’t mean anything coherent, then in practice that means its usage is essentially just bait laid for an old to engage in vocal ridicule, that, as is known by the baiter, is actually shamefully self-aggrandizing, and mostly just means the baited party is truly possessed of Ohio level skibidi rizz, bro is literally not even visiting his friend, you will always be the fanum taxed and never the fanum tax collector.
Slang is just language expanding in real time, and you don’t need to be an active speaker to stay fluent in contemporary expansions. Putting on an anachronistically contemporary affectation is not all that different from putting on a purposefully archaic affectation–you don’t have to belong to the group that created those linguistic conventions to use them for fun or as an affectation. Prithee, to be a master of the art of speech most true, the adage which clads the tongue in shining silver leaves one most beguiled, turning thy thoughts away from silver as when it is tarnish’d from age, or bent, and thus broken. Better the tongue be adorned as the first of the wise men of the East adorn’d Christ; in kingly gold. Lustrous for not merely the breadth of the kingdoms of man, but the breadth of the Kingdom of Heaven. Firm in form it be, and yet, if needs must, it bends to the will of its craftsman, as a noble beast of burden graciously bends to the will of its master.
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@Gaagaagiins lol thank you for reading the “lack of self awareness” in the usage of the vibe slang that had harshed my vibe. The particular “vibes” usage that irked me was in a Sony state of play recap with each game getting described as “having x vibes”. Just felt incredibly lazy and redundant and irksome. This is the way my good friend often uses it, in lieu of saying why the restaurant has a certain or specific vibe a whole bunch of semi related things will be thrown out in a vibe stew of a descriptor which I find amusing but unhelpful.
Vibes are good, vibes is fine, but there’s better ways to be descriptive about a thing or at least don’t keep regurgitating it. Personally I love coopting gen Z slang in a semi ironic way to connect with the utes at my work/for my own amusement. Throwing a dab in the lab is a good way to add some levity to the mundanity of the 9-5. The only instance that I take issue with is when it’s coopting another specific groups vernacular, and sometimes I do so without realizing but try and correct when I do learn better.
The generational thing is something that I find is often used to divide more than anything. The older I get the more arbitrary it all seems and the inter generational schisms often boil down to class dynamics/class consciousness (or lack thereof). But that’s a whole other discourse to dig into.
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Perennial image:
This is a dangerous game but it kind of speaks to the heart of why it can be both good and bad. There’s a big difference between an outsider using slang with or around other outsiders, especially without the right amount of self awareness or ironic inflection, and an outsider using it around or with insiders, again especially without the right amount of self awareness or ironic inflection.
Us newly old people can and perhaps even should be counter-trolling yutes by demonstrating that we both understand them perfectly AND that we know that we don’t belong.
But actually the worst is…
…inaccurate or even imprecise usage of cross-generational slang is perhaps the worst of all. I suppose you see that a lot when something escapes from subcultures into the broader zeitgeist, where it loses important context or other points of communicative or informational reference by being removed from that subculture. Then, while the slang itself does hold meaning that is mostly independent from the subculture, there are too many other contexts where a lack of understanding of the context of its origin end up looking foolish or ignorant for using it too far removed from the original context.
Good example is the usage of AAVE and ball culture slang (let’s not even get into the amount of overlap there is between those two) is naturally absolutely rife with clueless, cringe ass white people doing this left right and centre, especially as the many mouths of the wider culture zeitgeist chew it all up and spit it back out in an endless chain.
I didn’t have to scroll through aave struggle tweets for this particularly egregious example of someone (presumably a white person) misusing AAVE:
So I guess that’s why one must do their due diligence if referencing, ironically or otherwise, slang that has snuck out into the cultural zeitgeist from any kind of subculture or generational subset.
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i don’t understand that tweet why did her neck hurt
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I think in the Twitter thread someone said that she had been in a car accident and her intent in using the “down so bad” slang was to mean she was just struggling or having a bad time. However to be “down bad” has come to carry a connotation of being, no other way to put it, desperately sexually aroused, and, at time of using said phrase, consciously in a strong state of unfulfillment in that particular endeavor.
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I basically don’t like/ disregard any nomenclature that wasn’t a genre name printed on the cover of Japanese video game box art.
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i wasn’t even in doubt of why her neck hurt, just flabbergasted that she’d tell a 2 yo about it, but i guess i was way off.
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and no disrespect to the 2 year old, but “student” might be pushing that term a bit
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It’s no wonder they crashed the car.
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Sandbox
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In a similar vain, it ticks me off a little bit when games describe themselves as “cozy”. Sometimes literally in the title of the game.
I feel like it’s rarely a good sign for any piece of art or artist to put themselves in a box voluntarily.
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Graphics
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