this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2025
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40 years ago and before, slang had to travel by... get this... word of mouth. Now one obnoxious tik tok influencer (and the word is valid because they do actually influence others) to say something for a 12 year old to make it the new thing in her school, thereby infecting an entire town/village/planet. it's skibidi if you ask me. And I'm 55.
When I was a 12 year old people were drawing that pointy S, which first started showing up in graffiti in the 70's but became a staple in middle school notebooks by the 90's. Somehow it had gone fully national without seeming to have any adult influence in its spread.
Also around the same time, "my bad" entered the lexicon, and went from basketball-coded slang to basically mainstream acceptance by the 90's, with this blog post from 2005 amusedly marking its use among Ivy League faculty members.
Slang travelled through print magazines, underground zines, radio, musicians, books, etc.
Radio was huge. Some rapper could make slang local to his street corner famous and it would be in car commercials within two years.
On the other hand, we don't need to try to understand slangs anymore, because they will be obsolete tomorrow in the morning, when a new one appears.
No, some of them just become permanent.
"Cool" first showed up in the late 1910's and early 1920's, and so fully absorbed into the culture that each subsequent generation just knows it without really considering it to be slang.
"My bad" was novel slang in the 80's, went mainstream in the 90's, and is still with us today.
I'd guess that among recent slang, "yeet," "rizz," and "drip" will have the most staying power, most likely to be picked up unironically by older generations and just propagated from there.
But the ones who get integrated into language for the long-term, we will eventually see them all around and it will be impossible to miss