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"Hey Dad, I'm pansexual!"
Still in his underpants, he now cradles a skillet.
"Pansexual!"
He runs his tongue lasciviously over the Teflon surface, which, when I try to grab it, he pulls away with a shout of "gyat!" then bounces out of the room with a parting, "sigma!" This, minutes after he responded to my fumbling of his cousin's pronouns by rearing back from the breakfast table and, in the voice of some insane Southern boss, declaring "We ain't want them gender rights!”— slamming his fist on the table: “Pole or hole, dammit! Pole or hole!”
What I'm saying is, maybe 11-year-olds shouldn't have access to the internet.
Or to phones. Or YouTube. Or to whatever unseen source is emitting the endless stream of one-note sight gags and weirdly deracinated slang that this kid has been reciting like salah for the past six months. Is this early adolescence, early adolescence in the digital age, or some apocalyptic third option?
To commemorate this week’s end of NYC’s public school year, I want to explore these very questions.
I was prepared for the swears and the inappropriate language. I was not prepared for the Pynchonesque torrent of vaguely sci-fi, obscurely filthy verbiage I first noticed some eight months ago.
At my worst, I consider doing what my dad would do and “take the kid in to get looked at,” but recent articles and bestsellers tell me I’d just get the standard diagnoses: "social media” and/or "smart phones." This would only be half right in his case.
While our son isn't actually "on" social media — a drug-culture usage we really might have noticed sooner — he is on, or rather in, social media's obvious template. That is, the model for its values, discursive practices, and prevailing affective states, by which I obviously mean: middle school. And while I'm sympathetic to the psychological dangers social media poses to teenagers, and especially girls, my concern is how the particular drug-interaction — social media and middle school — has altered tween patois.
How has a global network of algorithmically selected, endlessly replicated stupid shit turned our kid into such a cypher: perseverating on an eerily circumscribed set of largely meaningless terms on the one hand, while, on the other, drawing from a ready supply of suspiciously polished, or sophisticated comic bits. Both of these make parenting fraught in different ways, obscuring the developing mind that's before us.
First the bits.
Were we in my parents' or grandparents' era, this is the age at which we'd be assessing the kid's innate comedic skills. We'd be monitoring his every well-turned dis or deft flight of verbal fancy, alert to the signs of a potential asset at family gatherings who has the unfortunate tendency to wisecrack himself into handcuffs.
But now, whenever the kid cracks a solid one, I have to restrain myself from sourcing it — from asking whether this ironic quip, that sly reference, or some other comedic device is the fruit of his associative mind or something he got from TikTok's functional analog, the dreaded YouTube Shorts.
This is comedy of the uncanny. Now for the “slang.”
If some online silent partner is making this kid’s repartee read more mature than this, his argot rather overcorrects this impression. I put scare quotes around "slang" because what I’m talking about doesn’t rise to most definitions of the term.
The words and phrases aren’t an alternate vocabulary, with relatively fixed referents. They aren't particularly coded, since the meanings of some words are self-evident while the meanings of others are, by all accounts, non-existent.
That said, these are riffs on riffs on riffs, many generations removed from the source, derived from memes, misheard lyrics, deracinated bits of Black American speech (AAVE), or some other digital speck that got lodged in the internet's mantle, was coated in its nacre, then spat back into its alimentary canal. And through some obscure, nationwide filtering process, the same half-dozen words seem to have been issued into middle schools across the country.
And these words are as follows: gyat, riz, sigma, Ohio, fanum tax, and skibidi-toilet.
If that line of text just pushed your eyes right off the page, I get it. Even typing these words felt like saying "Candyman" five times while looking in a mirror.
I also don't blame you for thinking that I either made a few of these up or rushed some overheard nonsense into the lexicon. To reassure you, I’ll first refer you to this brave middle-school teacher's report and, second, tell you that I've run this lexicon by parents of middle-school boys in California, Nevada, Philadelphia, Maine, and Massachusetts over the past two months, all of whom signed off on this list.
A few argued for the inclusion of “69,” whose explosive effect in tween conversation feels disproportionate to its reference to the sexual act (funny though that act may be) and brah, whose noted linguistic slippage prompted my new favorite bit of parental advice, from a Manhattan psychologist in USA Today, who apparently wants parents to cast themselves in as Margaret Dumont in a Marx Brothers routine. "Directly tell your child, 'My name is mom, not bruh.’” Oh, you impudent cad!
But since both words predate the phenomenon I’m talking about, I'll leave them — along with drag-ballroom loaners like “slay” and “giving,” basic derivations of Black speech, and au-courant brain rot like “Hawk Tuah” — to focus on those terms I hear used almost interchangeably in something like an operatic recitative.
Let’s get through the etymology as quickly as possible.
gyat
This derives from, ahem, a phonetic spelling of the first syllable in a common AAVE interjection in appreciative reference to a callipygous member of the desired sex: "gyat-damn” While I prefer a more distinguished alternative (see below), the expression works fine in its original context. But in its current middle-school usage, it can look like a bunch of white, Latin, and Asian kids channeling Robin Harris's Sweet Dick Willie. And not in reference to a particularly attractive set of buttocks but to the fact of buttocks, anyone’s. A janitor’s, crossing guard’s, 45-year-old male science teacher’s, mine if I tie my shoes anywhere near these freaks. To them, “gyat” is not an appraisal so much as a poke in the ribs. And as with the other words, “gyat” ultimately refers to itself, to the act of saying “gyat!”
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rizz
This slightly older term does not refer to a great young British actor but rather abbreviates charisma, and thus connotes sex appeal, charm, game, magnetism. But it does without implying that the bearer of this quality occupies the same space-time as an object of desire, but rather radiates it, like fluorescent lighting. In its verb form, rizz is the act of manually stroking someone's cheek, and thereby rizzing them up. But again, its fixed meaning is less important than its existence as sound and social currency. Than the very act of saying riza, rizzler, or perhaps — to those tween post-structuralists — rhizome.
sigma
This one strays into social meaning, then quickly strides back out. Its fraught origins are in the grim internet corners of masculine anxiety where incel-adjacent young men conspire against their own mental health by reifying perceived hierarchies (alpha, beta, high-value, low-value, etc.) But in middle school usage, “sigma” connotes a person, not always male, who's on a par with the alpha but somehow independent from established hierarchies. (How this is functionally different from an outcast or home-schooled kid beats me.) But most significantly to our purposes, all of this cashes out as a generic superlative: good, best, awesome, etc. Although, again, it's as frequently said without reference to anything.
Fanum tax
You know, you read about an intriguing phrase like this, peep its origins, weigh their significance, and conclude that the phrase is probably too stupid to actually say. But then you hear your kid say it, hear it used among his friend group, and slowly come to realize that, yes, it’s too stupid to actually say.
About its origins: you remember Kai Cenat, that genius who promised free gaming consoles to the thousands of his livestream fans willing to show up at Union Square to get beat on by cops and arrested? Well, he and another NYC live-streamer who goes by Fanum refer to cadging some chips or cookies from someone else's bag as "tax," and unless I'm missing something, that's it.
"Fanum tax”: slang for sharing snacks. And If you’re looking for a new arch-villain, there are those who credit Cenat for popularizing most of the aforementioned terms.
Ohio, skibidi, et al.
Like “Fanum tax,” these middle school usages almost instantly detach themselves from fixed meaning to become three-syllable units bobbing along with a half-dozen other novelties in an eerie verbal slipstream. While "Ohio" does have an associated set of memes, using the state as metonym for Midwestern dysfunction in way Devo would likely approve of, the fact that it’s a soundalike to Japan's "good morning" ("ohayo") seems equally significant, which is to say not very. It’s a word you say to be saying slang.
In this sense, it functions almost identically to…sigh… ”skibidi toilet.” This too is associated with an internet curio (a machinima-rendered music video mash-up reminiscent of early-80s Art of Noise), but in the wild, it largely serves as a nonsense scat syllable: the triplet skibidi landing on the trochaic downbeat toilet. And you don't feel 25 IQ points dumber for knowing this, I don’t know what to tell you.
As someone slightly older than hip-hop, I was around to observe the abrupt addition of a dozen-odd South Bronx- and LES-derived slang terms into my peers’ vernacular within months of “Rapper’s Delight.’ This should have erased any expectation that kids get speech only from f-to-f interactions at stickball games and basketball courts.
Obviously, the internet amplifies such transactions exponentially. So when I first saw some of these newer words defined for us squares, I assumed they were just the tip of a slang iceberg, stray cinders from the moronic inferno raging on TikTok and hardly worth tracking as they flashed into existence, mutated, went through the microscopic theme and variations that keep content churning, then disappeared. Instead, five or six of them have somehow hardened into words that function less like slang terms and more like syllables in this eerie glossolalia suffered by millions of American kids.
Some trace its components to an almost content-less viral TikTok video, which I hesitated to link to here the same way I'd hesitate to transport a box of supposed athletic socks stamped "RADIOACTIVE" and "BIOHAZARD. For some reason, this thing really does send a chill down my spine. Maybe it’s because whatever secret message makes a prepubescent kid's tuneless, half-asleep, slang-substituting rendition of a disposable autotuned club track called "ecstasy" by a neoprene pop act called Suicide-Idol go viral, I’d rather not know what it is.
But this kind of adult paranoia is pulling levers of actual power.
Weirded-out commentators like Jonathan Haidt — whose best-selling The Anxious Generation: how the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness reverses the thesis of his previous attempted jeremiad, The Coddling of the American Mind — insist that smartphones and social media are the real enemies, hijacking kids’ brains and making them depressed and miserable. The thing is, these brain-rot slang and memes don’t make any of the kids I know depressed or miserable. They make me depressed and miserable. But they don’t make me want to pass laws.
When I sensed that my initial shock and amusement at my son’s crazy-talk was starting to skew a bit conspiratorial, I recalled certain ’50s/early-’60s science fiction stories that sublimated fears about the gathering force of post-war youth culture into creepy tales.
I’m talking about the stone camp-classic radio play The Juvenile Rebellion (“It is a wise father that knows his own child…”) and Ray Bradbury’s short story Zero Hour. In the latter, the imaginary friends of ten-year-olds playing a group game called “Invasion” turn out to be Martians enlisting that age group as shock troops in an imminent takeover.
Such stories speak to the sinking awe that comes with the realization that the small person in your home who you’d assumed was in throes of some private personality disorder is really a homegrown emissary from reality, from the world as it actually is, or as it will be in the very near future.
See, this is the kind of old-school neurosis I hear animating Haidt’s crusade to save youngsters from tech’s corrupting influence. And it has an even more Cold War vibe in acts like the Kids Online Safety Act, whose anodyne title masks a truly aggressive censorship policy. I hear echoes of these in some ofthe more hysterical posts about the recent slang (“my son has been repeating [these words] while he convulses on the ground, I’m scared he might be having seizures”).
But I also suspect that some of the authors of posts like the above are actually in the demographic under discussio – running a little intergenerational psy-ops in the tradition of my generation’s hero Megan Jasper, the former Sub Pop receptionist who, in the early-90s media rush to comprehend “grunge,” obliged a New York Times reporter’s request for some new grunge lingo by free-associating a bunch of words and phrases on the spot: ”lamestain,” “cob nobbler,” “swinging on the flippity-flop”—which all found their way directly into “the paper of record.”
It’s no fun realizing that you’ve joined the tom-tom club. And the one definitional requirement of slang that this infantile lingo utterly fulfills is exclusivity. This is a linguistic usage that almost physically repels outsiders, its verbal components turning sour in the mouth of anyone over, say, age 15. The few times I jokingly used some of these words in the kid’s presence, he showed the kind of visceral disgust I associate with the violation of some basic taboo. I actually felt briefly ashamed.
So I’m entertaining the possibility that there may be a subtler, ambivalent linguistic practice going on here, that the speaker is performing the use of this slang as much as they’re using it to express. And that this performance is intended to provoke, repel, or otherwise trigger nearby authority figures. Even prompting some of the more unwell ones to burn through 3,000 words trying to figure this out.
If there’s this much cerebral activity going on with the kid’s slang, maybe the far-flung references and salty language in his little stand-up bits aren’t just copy-pasted from internet memes. Maybe there’s some synthesis and adaptation going on. No one’s wisecracks are truly ex nihilo. Wit reveals itself in rapid deployment, situational awareness, and other performative aspects. So why am I still stuck in this low-grade paranoia – unsure what part of his speech is him, and what part’s the digitally-enhanced middle-school hivemind speaking through him?
Breakfast again: Having finished his cereal, the kid picks up a carton of oat milk and reads a warning label aloud: "Make sure inner seal is unbroken." I get up to bus my bowl and half-notice as he raises the carton and peers into its open spout. At the dishwasher I hear him go: "Oyk? Oyk? Oyk?"—which I realize is a seal's bark put through English actor Rob Brydon’s small-man-in-a-box routine.
I race back to the table, lock eyes with him, and all but jab my index finger into his chest: "Alright, hold up,” I say. “Is that you or YouTube?"
"Wha—?” He’s indignant. “Me! I made it up!"
"Ok, ok," I say, side-eyeing him as I return to the kitchen.
I let it go for now. But don’t think I’m not googling this when he’s away at school.
This post slaps!
My child-free jaw is on the floor…. Skibidi toilet I think I get - but Ohio??? Great piece!