How old are you?

If you are reading this, there is a good chance you fall into this category (please I am looking for a term for this category but I can describe the attributes). This is how you know how old you are…when you do not understand the “slangs” and have no clue who the designer being discussed is and yet you think you are young. Lately, it is either I have been going to lunch at the wrong time or I have totally lost “it”…’IT’ being a part of the ‘happening group’. Put simply, it means that I am definitely part of the aging generations (this is sad if it turns out to be the truth honestly) because I have no clue what the young ones are talking about. My sister in-law actually hit the nail on the head a few days ago when she said that “coming first in school is not a good thing” and she will not ask her daughter to aim for first position in academics (first position in dancing is good enough). I was curious because I came from a home where you have to explain yourself for coming second and I do not know any better than that and my son already knows that “A” grade is the only acceptable pass level. My sister in-law said that it is because of I buried myself in books that I have no clue what else is going on around me. Who knows maybe she is right but we shall leave that topic alone for now.

Recently, I have been struggling to understand the conversations around me…I am lost most of the time (I mean social conversations) so if you are feeling young and hip your vocabulary is sure to give you away no matter what you have stated your age to be. I find out that I am constantly asking “what does that mean”…Jan means London…”my bad” means my error or my wrong judgment…and a host of other ones ..they have escaped me now as I write so where are these words coming from?

The office is not immuned to this jargon or rather evolution of meaningless words or phrases. When I started working over 12 years ago, you will get a memo saying “ASAP” but I have never heard anyone speak it. Today I hear, “please could you “asap it”. “Put the docks in a row” …It took the grace of God for me to figure that it means “let us get organized around here. Definitely, language is a generational thing. It has huge implications…as the baby boomers are aging and people like us in between that generation and the generation Y who is internet generation with words from Mars and Venus planets, we must try to understand them or we are cut off entirely…

The slangs you use, the phrases you use (at work ) in social conversation is sure to give away your age + or _ anyone will guess it right just like the style of your clothes or the cut of your jeans …no not the cut, the name brand on your jeans. I will be wiring about what we are wearing in another piece.

This whole language or rather vocabulary change makes me wonder why I am trying so hard to get my son to write the established letters of English alphabet the way we have been taught when he seriously wanted to invent his own. It seems like everything goes these days as long as you have one or two people willing to copy it from you and believe that what you say it means is what it means.

Have I said anything about the contents of younger generation discussions? Hardly is it about one book, or one social issue (except plane crashes) (sometimes and most times yes, it could be about one movie or the or the other) but then it degenerates to the movie actors and actresses and their private lives are the hottest discussions and any one wonders why paparazzi can go at any length to get the scoops and juice it up about the celebrity private lives? You wonder why people will die running away from paparazzi? Their stories are hot, it sells and the world laps it up because we have found ourselves with a generation that have no thoughts for anything else but mundane things as my pastor will put it. The net helps circulate “gists’ within seconds so you are even hot being the circulator of mundane gist…people flock to you and you are termed to be happening or hype

If such discussions do not hold your attention then you are old and belong to my generation no matter what date you quote in your birth certificate…the real young ones are caught up in these frivolities as my father will say…unfortunately they are no longer frivolities dad, they are the “in things”!!!