Teens Aren't Ruining Language

People of all ages influence linguistic change, and it's always been that way.

“Don't grill, dude,” was a thing the boys I knew in high school would say to each other a lot. It meant, essentially, stop hassling me. There was also “budge,” short for “budget,” which presumably was a way of saying that something was cheap, in a bad way. “Blatantly” was frequently used for emphasis. A conversation might go like this:

“I can’t go out tonight.”
“That’s budge.”
“Don’t grill, dude.”
“Blatantly budge.”

I have not heard these terms, except ironically among old friends, since maybe 1999. I’m pretty sure that’s because no one outside of a cluster of schools in my Philadelphia-area hometown uttered them in the first place. More broadly, this was an era when agreeable circumstances were “phat,” high-maintenance friends were “spazzes,” and you might taunt someone by saying, “psyche!” (Or was it “sike”?) And then, the 1990s ended, and all that slang did what it does best: It faded.

Fad words often have a different trajectory in today’s social-network-connected, meme-ified world. Platforms like Vine and Twitter have helped spread and standardize terms that might otherwise have stayed regional. And certainly the Internet has shortened the lifespan of some slang, especially when co-opted by brands trying to speak in teen parlance. (See also: On fleek, bae, basic, et al.)

From: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/01/blatantly-budge-and-other-dead-slang/431433/

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