Total tubular talking: how slang has changed over time
Each decade brings in a new wave of pop culture including new styles of music, television, movies, and… the way we talk? In the last 40 years, parties have changed from being “radical!” to “lit!”
The Californian 80’s saw the rise of the valley girl and the surfer boy. Immortalized in movies, the valley girl is famous for her phrases such as, “Oh my God!” and the frequent use of “like” and “totally,” while most surfer boys were depicted using phrases like, “gnarly.” Social media wasn’t around, and pop culture consisted of movies and MTV. Although some young people today are accused of being a valley girl, (which is totally bogus!), the modern valley girl speaks differently.
While the original valley girl stands out with her uptalk, or speaking in questions, the modern valley girl is known for a phenomenon called, “vocal fry,” (keep in mind that men do this as well). Vocal fry involves lowering the voice at the end of a sentence, or as described by Faith Saile, “the way a Kardashian speaks.” Words such as “like” still stay around, but expressions such as, “stoked!” and “barf me out!” have, for the most part, gone away.
Today brings a variety of new slang terms that make words like “rad” and “gnarly” seem tame. Phrases like “get rekt” and “fam” definitely make parents confused, and let’s not forget the ever-present, “bae.” The internet makes slang travel around much quicker, so much that words such as “hella”, and “chill” have made their way back into a group conversation. Vines, Tumblr, and even Instagram or Facebook often begin this cycling of vernacular, or create new words or phrases entirely. Earlier this year, a popular vine depicting a man yelling “deez nuts!” made its way around the Internet, so that we could all reply, “got em!” From highly regrettable word choices such as “on fleek” to describing someone who was insulted as “roasted”, the modern era looks to be no different in its generation-specific words.
Yet, as ridiculous as modern slang looks, it’s hard to forget that at some point, people regularly used the term “tubular.”
