Chill! Gen Z and Alpha haven't ruined language

Internet slang is redefining the rules of emotionally engaged communication but every generation has its own speaking shortcuts

- Somak Ghoshal

Earlier this week, Oxford University Press announced three contenders for the honour of the Word of the Year (WoTY) 2025: "aura farming", "biohack" and "rage bait".

Two of these aren't words but phrases, if you are a strict grammarian, but that doesn't matter. Which, as you will realise, ties in with the argument of this essay.

If you are a Boomer (born between 1946-64), a Gen Xer (1965-80), or even a Millennial (1981-96) scratching your head over the meaning of such words—or others like “67” (picked by Dictionary.com as its WoTY), “rizz”, “skibiddi” and “parasocial” (Cambridge Dictionary's WoTY 2025)—you are not alone. And I don't just mean among your contemporaries.

Many people of your age felt the same way as far back as the early 1900s in the US, when phrases like “23 skidoo” gained currency among the youth of the era. Like many terms in Gen Z (1997-2010) and Gen Alpha (2010-24) vocabulary, it has no fixed meaning. Depending on the context of its usage, 23 skidoo could refer to “get out”, “leave quickly,” or simply be a form of catcalling.

If we go back a few more decades, the English writer Lewis Carroll left his readers just as perplexed with portmanteau words like “chortle”, which he created by combining “chuckle” and “snort”, in Jabberwocky, one of the greatest nonsense poems ever written, in his children’s classic, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865). More than 150 years after its whimsical origin, chortle is part of the English lexicon, though mostly used in writing, usually as an archaism. The nonsense verse of Edward Lear offers more such examples (“crumpet”, “crudy”), though not as popular as Carroll's inventions, as do the poems of Ogden Nash (“chiffle”, “goggerel”).