The author says slang is very much alive nowadays with kids. Courtesy of the author Slang's role is shifting as digital culture spreads and dilutes new expressions quickly. Social media and AI have made slang more mainstream, reducing its power to signal belonging. Inventing personal slang at home fosters creativity and connection amid online language trends. "What's slanging?" I ask my kids, hoping for a tutorial on the latest lingo. "Our teacher threatened yellow slips if anyone reacts again to six-seven," they tell me. That sounds fair to me. My kids are no strangers to "bruh," and the occasional "slay," "chat," or "aura" slips out, but mostly they observe the terminology more than they use it. It's as if slang has become more environmental than conversational — absorbed through memes, TikToks, and YouTube shorts rather than invented face-to-face. I've always been fascinated by how slang evolves and marks belonging, a perspective shaped by a Ph.D. in English and over two decades of teaching writing. When I was their age, my older brother swore he invented the word "cheesy," and I believed him. This was the same era of "grody to the max," "take a chill pill," and saying "not," following an expression you wanted to undo. The snark was alive and well, but so too was the feeling of co-creating meaning. Slang is very much alive Today's mainstream slang catches quickly and burns out fast, but the impulse for creative wordplay and shared inside language hasn't disappeared. In fact, there's a notable resurgence of informal language and catchphrases, surfacing in social media feeds and slipping into everyday conversation. These expressions can be irritating and laughable at times, as the recent "Saturday Night Live" "Boys Podcast" sketch captured, but they also suggest something else: a kind of post-pandemic recovery, a return to the shared inventiveness that makes language and community feel alive again. It may also signal a desire to pull language back into lived reality — something felt and exchanged, not just circulated online. The author's oldest son tells her that slang nowadays is all brain rot. Courtesy of the author My 7th grader isn't so optimistic. "Most of it's brain rot, Mom," he says. The term "brain rot" was the OED's Word of the Year in 2024, and names the assumed mental decline that comes from consuming meaningless, cheaply produced online fluff — the kind of digital debris that sticks in your head like an earworm jingle. When they gave me some examples of brain rot, I didn't recognize any of them as legible words. Brain rot feels stagnant, often generated or amplified by AI-driven content mills. Slang, by contrast, is supple, improvisational, and formed playfully through interaction. Still, the drift into goofy, vapid, nonsensical territory is apparent — very different from five years ago, when many of the neologisms (social distancing, "you're muted," covidiot, doomscrolling, superspreader) carried the weight of a dark and frightening time. Today's fears may be different, but the language feels curiously lighter, as if we're craving collective release or searching for some semblance of shared reality in an increasingly fractured information ecosystem. We invent language at home But there's a catch: the very tools that amplify slang's current boom also dilute its power. When slang becomes instantly legible to everyone, it stops doing the social work it was designed for — signaling belonging, intimacy, and challenge to authority and establishment norms. I'm certainly guilty of a desire to be in the know, a curiosity that the internet happily monetizes through Slang-tionary-style podcasts and Gen Z dictionary videos. Maybe adults' fascination with youth slang reveals something else: a longing for the creativity and play we've lost to corporate jargon and productivity-speak. Workplaces are full of circling back, pivoting, and drilling down, especially as more communication shifts to asynchronous exchanges or AI-assisted drafting. No wonder linguistic playfulness feels like a relief. Slang — especially the kind that emerges organically rather than algorithmically — offers a counterweight to a culture that increasingly values efficiency over expressiveness. Lately, I've been trying to turn down the volume on the ambient noise of contemporary jargon to pay closer attention to the language we invent at home. Cultivating our own family lingo has created space for the kind of cross-generational play that keeps us laughing and in sync with one another. We have alter egos, jingles, and plenty of made-up words and phrases. Only in our house could you hear "What the bingo, ignus?" or "Darbitron, where's my warder barder?" When a phrase sticks, it's a real joy to hear where it shows up next and how it shifts in sound, timing, or song. When my son tells me he invented "hallee-you-la," I don't question it for a second; the delight is in the discovery, in the act of finding language rather than receiving it. In a world where language is increasingly pushed at us, inventing our own may be one of the last places where creativity feels genuinely shared. Read the original article on Business Insider