By Shaun Connell
- National survey of parents reveals parental proficiency in 2023 slang.
- Parents in California scored above the national average.
- Interactive quiz for readers to test their own 2023 slang skills.
Sometimes, just talking to anyone under 25 can feel like they are speaking a whole different language. And actually, in some cases, they are. Each generation crafts its own fabulous, quirky lingo, but these days, language evolves so fast – and if you’re the parent of a young person, what they say might just end up sounding completely alien.
USDictionary.com wanted to find out how many parents are, well, down with the kids – and how many are just baffled about what their offspring are trying to communicate to them. They surveyed 3,000 parents to find out how much they really know about the younger generations’ 2023 slang.
To take an example, parents were quizzed on what the term ‘bussin’ means. A quarter didn’t have a clue – could it mean being extremely busy, like the word ‘bustling’, as 14% of parents thought? Or does it mean ‘making a lot of noise’, as 6% thought. Five percent presumed it means arriving late, like a tardy bus – which we can kind of see the logic behind… still, that means three quarters of parents are pretty confident, slang-wise.
When broken down by state, USDictionary.com found that Iowans were the most likely to be talking their kids’ language – parents in the Hawkeye state scored a sick 94% when tested on 2023 slang. On the opposite end of the spectrum, parents in Vermont placed last when it comes to street lingo, with just a 25% pass rate – cringe! Parents in California, on the other hand, scored a lit 80%, placing them among the most street smart in America when it comes to their kids’ slang.
USDictionary.com has created a quiz so that readers can test their own knowledge of 2023’s trending words (click on ’embed’ to host on your site).
There are some other slang words and phrases you might not have heard of, such as ‘rizz.’ Could this be something to do with, um, rice, and maybe mean that something is bland and tasteless, a bit like rice is? Or that something is rising? Nope – rizz means to flirt, or to charm.
This next one may be more familiar, especially to anyone who watches RuPaul’s Drag Race. To ‘slay’ does not mean to kill or destroy (well not literally, anyway) – it means to kill it in the fashion sense, where your look is so incredible that all other people’s looks are made inferior, or destroyed by it.
And this one might make the most sense of all – when someone ends a sentence or conversation by actually saying out loud the word ‘period’ – we know that in written text, the period signifies the full stop, or end of the sentence, but to voice it adds extra emphasis that there is nothing more to be said on the matter.
“We hope that by shedding light on 2023’s slang trends, we can help parents not just ‘keep up’ but also feel more connected to their children’s world. After all, language is a vital tool for communication and understanding, and these new words are testament to its living, breathing nature” says Shaun Connell from USDictionary.com.
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