At my age words are now taking on an interesting twist. I do not understand whole conversations that my grandchildren are having. Over the years I have made it through sick (but one is not ill), baaad (but it is really good), and wicked (not evil but great.) I understand that my grandparents probably were puzzled at groovy (not channels in something), hip (not part of one’s body), and bitchin’ (did she really say that word?) But now even slang, which used to mean one thing, now means another. “That’s lit,” a young relative exclaims with obvious admiration. But to me things or events are not lit, only people when they have had too much to drink.
And then there are memes. At first, I did not even know what they were and searched, much to the younger generation’s amusement, for the source of the term and its meaning. It turns out an evolutionary biologist first coined the word in 1976 to describe an idea, behavior, or style that rapidly spreads from person to person in a culture. The word meme, which he invented, came from the Greek word mimeme, which means imitated thing. But even when armed with this perhaps irrelevant information, I still cannot always understand the memes that my grandchildren show me while consumed with merriment. Often neither the people involved nor the cultural references which are so relevant to them are at all apparent to me.
I guess I could make a great effort to learn this new vocabulary and understand all aspects of the current culture, but I find I really do not care. Whatever the recent internet ‘influencer’ is doing can be done without my knowledge or interest. I still want to maintain an awareness of my children’s and grandchildren’s lives, I want to vote in an informed manner, and I want to keep up with the issues of the day. But as for the rest of it, I will just remain in my aging world and its vocabulary. Perhaps I just arrested at groovy.