Real teenagers don’t say ‘awesome’

Yesterday, I had a lesson in linguistics.

“One moronic boy on the class chat said that he had rekt me,” Aaliya said during dinner. “So I rekt him back.”

Aaliya didn’t seem particularly perturbed about being “rekt” but I sat up. “What does that mean?” I asked, curious and a tad alarmed. I write books for children so I’m always on the look out for the lingo of the day. Also, to have rekt and be rekt didn’t sound very nice. It was my duty as a Mummy-Who-Means-Business to know these things.

Aaliya sighed and rolled her eyes. Then she tried to explain. “It’s a little like poned,” she said. “You know.”

Vivek and I stared at her, bewildered. No, we did not know. Aaliya was 13, but we were not. Our friends hadn’t poned us — and if they did, we’d have another word for it. Probably.

Finally, Vivek asked, “What is poned?”

“Poned is, you know, like ragged, burned, destroyed, rekt.”

This was beginning to sound worse and worse. Vivid images of forest fires and ripped schoolbags filled my head till Aaliya clarified, “Suppose somebody on the class chat writes, “I’m going shopping today. Then someone will write something like, ‘Good, you can buy yourself a life.’ That is poning.”

“Oh, you mean a Smart Aleck remark?” I asked. That didn’t sound quite so bad.

“I guess,” Aaliya shrugged, and turned away to chat with her sisters, leaving me to puzzle over the etymology of these teen words.

Rekt = wrecked? Maybe. But poned? The regular dictionary is very clear that pone is a kind of cornbread. So where on earth did this phrase come from? I turn to a slang dictionary and find that it means ‘Powerfully owned, dominated’.

For which the only appropriate response — very fusty and uncool — is, “Good grief.”

Equally mystifying—as far as I’m concerned—is the use of the hot, new insult in Nisha and Naima’s class. “The boys call all the girls peasants,” Naima reported with a giggle, a couple of days ago. “It’s very odd. They look at us, sneer and say, ‘You are such a peasant!’”

I goggled at the thought of 11-year-old Mumbai boys wandering around like Hindi-film Thakurs and tossing feudal insults at the peskier girls in their class. And my political-correctness antenna twitched furiously. But then it’s been in overdrive since last year, when everything and everybody was Dumb or Lame or a Loner. To this merry gang we can now add Haters.

Haters, as far as I can make out, are people who are mean and sneery and generally negative. Which makes some sort of ungrammatical sense, I suppose.

At the other end of the spectrum is ‘epic’ — a word with a remarkably long shelf life. Everything is epic. Birthday parties. Haircuts. Fights with boys. Cinnamon cookies.

“Also awesome. Awesome is like epic,” Nisha and Naima pipe in.

“Not awesome,” Aaliya counters. “Only kids like you use awesome. Real teenagers don’t. Basically, it’s not cool.”

“Who says?”

“It is not. Actually.”

“I’ve heard people in your class use the word.”

“That’s totally not true.”

The conversation reminds me uncomfortably of my own teenage days. That was a linguistic period when the hip girls used the word “hip”, and the ordinary mortals said “hep”. And that one vowel revealed so much — whether you had been listening to the right music, whether you visited London and danced at the Hippodrome. Basically whether you had made it or not.

I shudder at the memory and realize that nothing has changed. And I’m basically, totally glad not to be a teenager any more. Actually.