Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/06/27/an-old-persons-guide-to-skibidi-and-other-gen-z-slang.html
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Skibidi-doo-dah, skibidi-ay, my oh my, it’s a strange thing to say.
Meh. Get that skibidi skidoo off my lawn. 
ETA 2 days later to note that in old person terms, this means they can jolly well skedaddle!
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Also just until recently a little kid remixed the lyrics to a tiktok sound and said and I quote: “sticking out your gyat for the rizzler, that’s so skibidi”
all excellent “A.I.” fodder and i can not lie
by the bye, typing of “get off my lawn!”, it’s cake day for a whole lot of us ancients because june-27 some year or other (2009?ish) was when they rebuilt the old old BoingBoing system …now where did i put me shirt?
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I looked at the links:
- Instagram - nope.
- Tik Tok? double nope.
- Oh, it has YouTube… 100% shorts?
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I love that “skibidi” is now being used as a term for “either bad or cool depending on context”. Especially since I am a member of Bill & Ted’s Excellent Generation, for whom “bad” had a lengthy period of meaning “cool”.
Honestly I’m just glad that “skibidi” doesn’t also mean “[racist slur]” what with it apparently having been incubated on fucking 4chan for a while.
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I have littles that do this. Yet for me, it’ll always be:
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I watched about half of the Skibiidi Toilet saga earlier this year (I should go back and finish it). There is a plot running through them all. A back and forth of victories and defeats between the toilets and the speaker heads. It is weird, but also, I kinda like it.
Also, Little Big had a song come out in 2018 called Skibidi, and I have to wonder if that was an influence or not.
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Are we still calling 11-15 year olds Gen Z? And pretending 11 and 27 year olds have enough in common to be called the same generation?
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I use old people slang - so the kids can’t understand what I’m saying.
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I grok you.
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Assigning generational labels based on groups of birth years with arbitrarily chosen cutoff dates is, and always has been, a silly construct for creating media narratives.
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I’ve recently started explaining to my kids’ friends that the newish youth slang “riz” is just an abbreviation of “charisma,” a factoid that most of them apparently never realized.
Knowing that kind of thing doesn’t make me look cool in any way but it does make me look a little bit like the wizened old History Man from Furiosa who carries the knowledge of the before times.
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This was on fleeq!
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I know. I just don’t know what the media narrative even is when the label is that broad. Like, feel free to define category words that describe groups of birth years, there are in fact tendencies and trends that shift over time in ways that can be useful to recognize. But why do they need to make them discrete, singular, and non-overlapping? Why do they need to make them refer to about the same number of years now as they did almost a century ago? What does this actually accomplish, and for whom? Cui bono?
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I guess I’m considered old now (GenX), but I enjoy seeing new slang being created by younger generations. I remember as a kid how our slang used to confuse and intimidate older generations. We fear what we don’t understand, I guess.
It’s not slang that makes me feel old, but it’s how content is made now that I guess I will never fully understand or embrace. The TikToks of this guy are a perfect example. He’s giving really interesting and insightful information, but he speaks super fast, there are soo many jump cuts to eliminate pauses, and the camera is constantly moving. It’s probably just me, but it makes me feel anxious. That’s a majority of content nowadays and I guess my GenX-boomer ass will just have to deal with it.
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A spiffing stratagem, me old mucker.
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It really makes 'em 23 skidoo!
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Marketing segmentation/targeting types. (Yeah they still believe in that sort of broad-brush shenanigans.)
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