IYKYK What's that?????
Youth:
"The undiscovered country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will."
There is a generation gap.
Some of my readers will see the quotation above and recognize it from Shakespeare's famous "To be or not to be" speech spoken by Hamlet. I have it wrong. In Shakespeare the undiscovered country is death, not youth. But no one returns to youth, either, and I find youth remote and puzzling, so I used it instead of song lyrics from the 1960s.
Bits of Shakespeare are part of the common culture of most Americans. The Bible, too, is part of common culture, although Trump showed the limitations of that when he claimed to love "Two Corinthians." Shakespeare and the Bible are unifying fragments of the American canon -- the common core of our culture. Slang language is the changing frontier of it. It isn't the 1960s anymore, but I am trying to understand young people. This is a political blog and young people vote.
I read something by Monica Lewinsky this week. She is 50 years old now. Fifty! She wrote "IYKYK" as if people would know what that meant.
Do you know what IYKYK means? I didn't. It means "If you know, you know." It is used the way I have used the phrase "You had to be there." IYKYK means that one needs to be inside the loop to understand.
Even my oldest readers know that FYI means For Your Information and FAQ means Frequently Asked Questions. Those initials are part of common culture. We are all in that loop.
The following are less common but still likely to be written without explanation in the mainstream media.
MSN That is the abbreviation for that mainstream media, e.g. New York Times.
SEO means search engine optimization.
ETF means exchange traded fund. Investors know what it means.
YOLO That means you only live once, so so take the risk. The financial media used this abbreviation to explain why people were making wildly speculative investments in bitcoin and NFTs.
NFTs are non-fungible tokens, i.e. unique copies of images.
UX means User Experience in a computer setting.
The next group of abbreviations are part of the half-secret language of a generation. It is code that defines and congeals its tribe members. They are in the loop.
TL;DR means "Too Long; Didn't Read."
LOL means Laugh Out Loud. LMAO means Laughing My Ass Off. ROFLMAO means Rolling On The Floor Laughing My Ass Off.
IMHO means In My Humble Opinion.
WTF means What the Fuck.
DK means Don't Know.
K means OK.
HMU means Hit Me Up.
IRL means In Real Life.
BRB means Be Right Back
OMW means On My Way.
F2F means Face to Face.
MOS means Mom Over Shoulder. It is a head's up to the recipient that the person they are texting doesn't have privacy.
I have discovered some words used in a way new to me."Boojie" is slang for something bourgeois."Cringe" means something embarrassing or cringeworthy."Rizz"is short for charisma, meaning one has "game," i.e. confidence and attractiveness.
Americans vote largely because of political party, overlaid with identity of social class, ethnicity, gender, education level, and neighborhood. It is a matter of affiliation and connection to one's tribe, not policy congruence. On policy grounds of student loans, abortion, and good employment prospects, Joe Biden has a lot to offer young people. Democrats think it should move the political needle his way, but it doesn't very much. It's frustrating for them.
Age isn't "just a number." Age is a tribe and a tribe has a language. Age cohorts want to define themselves. It is inconvenient for Democrats but it is reality. Trump doesn't connect well with young people, but neither does Biden. Trump can win without the youth vote, but Biden cannot.
Note: If a reader my age needs to look up these and other definitions, it confirms that this is a kind of "foreign language." That is my point. A special half-secret language is a way to define one's generation as separate and different. Here are some links:
1. SlickText
3. Preply