- Speaker #0
Welcome to the Gen Z Shift, a podcast decoding Generation Z and Generation Alpha for leaders, brands, and changemakers. Based on the research and articles of Benoit van Kouwenberg, a European expert on Generation Z, Generation Alpha, and brand culture. Each episode helps you understand the generations reshaping how we work, consume, connect, and live. Because the future isn't coming, it's already here.
- Speaker #1
It definitely is.
- Speaker #0
Yeah, and well, I have a confession to make to you, the listener, today. And honestly... It's a pretty painful one.
- Speaker #1
Oh no, what did you do?
- Speaker #0
I tried dropping the word Riz at the dinner table last month to impress my nephew.
- Speaker #1
Oh wow, yeah. That's brave. I thought I had the context down perfectly, you know, like I used it confidently in a sentence. And I swear to you, I watched his soul physically leave his body.
- Speaker #0
Yep, the classic freeze.
- Speaker #1
The room just froze, the temperature dropped. I got that unmistakable, just agonizing blank stare of total secondhand embarrassment.
- Speaker #0
It is the ultimate social misfire. I mean, honestly, it's a trap that most adults fall into at some point because you probably use the right word. Right. I did. I knew it meant charisma.
- Speaker #1
Right. You had the dictionary definition down, but you achieved the entirely wrong result. And that's because you thought you were communicating information, but you were actually you're violating a boundary.
- Speaker #0
That is such a harsh reality check. But I mean, it's the exact core mission for our deep dive today. Because we are exploring this brilliant piece of research by Benoit van Kouwenberg that unpacks the wildly fast, deliberately absurd world of Gen Z and Gen Alpha slang.
- Speaker #1
It really is a fascinating ecosystem.
- Speaker #0
It is. So if you're listening right now, whether you're a parent, a marketing executive, or someone trying to drive change, and you've ever tried to use youth slang and instantly felt that room freeze, well, we're going to explain exactly the mechanics behind why you failed.
- Speaker #1
Yeah, and to really set the stage for you. We have to start by recognizing a fundamental truth that Van Kouwenberg lays out right at the beginning of his research. Slang today is not, and I repeat, is no longer a vocabulary list waiting to be translated. It is a highly complex, rapidly shifting social code. Like, its primary design is to create immediate belonging for the people on the inside and total unyielding confusion for those on the outside.
- Speaker #0
Let's unpack the mechanics of that, actually, because I think the natural instinct for most of us adults is to treat this like a foreign language translation exercise. Absolutely. We literally just type into Google, what does RIS mean or what is brain rot? We look for a one-to-one synonym, but treating it like a French to English dictionary is, well, that's where the failure begins.
- Speaker #1
It's just the completely wrong framework. When we treat slang like a simple vocabulary swap, We completely miss the sociology of the interaction. In this context, words aren't definitions. Right. They are social codes. They're used to express a specific identity, to signal a highly niche type of humor, and really importantly, to establish distance from anyone who isn't part of the conversation.
- Speaker #0
It kind of feels almost like a digital secret handshake.
- Speaker #1
Oh, that's a great way to put it.
- Speaker #0
Because a handshake doesn't, like, mean anything in a literal sense. But if you do the handshake too slowly or you do it in a corporate boardroom or with someone who just isn't initiated.
- Speaker #1
Everyone instantly knows you aren't part of the club.
- Speaker #0
Exactly. You just don't have the muscle memory.
- Speaker #1
That is a brilliant analogy because knowing a word's value doesn't come from reading a definition. It comes from knowing exactly when, where and how to deploy it. So when you use Riz at the dinner table, the failure wasn't linguistic.
- Speaker #0
It was contextual.
- Speaker #1
Right. The failure was an adult. Trying to perform a teenager's secret handshake in a domestic family setting. It just doesn't belong there.
- Speaker #0
But, okay, let me push back a little bit here. Aren't a lot of these words just kids being weird and random on the internet? Some of the phrases sound like pure nonsense. Is there really a deeper sociological strategy at play? Or is it just the natural chaos of being a kid on the internet?
- Speaker #1
It looks like chaos. But the randomness you're sensing is actually a deliberate feature. It's not a bug. By making the language completely absurd or hyper-specific, young people are actively intentionally distancing themselves from outsiders. Think about how previous generations spread their slang. It was usually through schools, specific local neighborhoods, or, you know, underground offline music scenes.
- Speaker #0
Right. The boundary was physical. You had to be there.
- Speaker #1
Exactly.
- Speaker #0
Yeah.
- Speaker #1
But today, Gen Z and Gen Alpha are using platforms like Discord, Roblox, TikTok, and Twitch. These are spaces that are inherently global. Anyone can enter them at any time.
- Speaker #0
Including 50-year-old marketing directors.
- Speaker #1
Exactly. So to keep their in-group clearly defined in a borderless digital world, they have to rely on absurdity. They use rapid shifts in language as their defense mechanism.
- Speaker #0
Wow. That really reframes the entire concept of internet slang for me. Yeah. And I think it challenges a massive assumption we all tend to make. Like, we assume these young digital natives are just inventing new words out of thin air in their bedrooms.
- Speaker #1
Right. That's the big myth.
- Speaker #0
But Van Kouwenberge's research points out that the origins are deeply rooted and usually quite hidden from the mainstream.
- Speaker #1
Yeah. And looking closely at those roots totally shatters that myth of internet invention. The reality is that Gen Z and Gen Alpha rarely invent these slang terms from scratch. What they do is act as accelerators.
- Speaker #0
Accelerators.
- Speaker #1
Yes. They take language that has already been created by older or highly specific marginalized communities and they transform it. They globalize it.
- Speaker #0
The text provides some incredibly powerful examples of this. Take a phrase like no cap, which just means telling the truth. Right. It didn't just fall out of a TikTok algorithm one day. It has deep historical roots in African-American English and hip hop culture.
- Speaker #1
Exactly. Or the phrase it's giving, which is just ubiquitous now.
- Speaker #0
Oh, yeah. You hear that everywhere.
- Speaker #1
But that originated in black and Lanteen LGBTQ plus ballroom culture decades ago. It wasn't invented by a teenager on Instagram last year.
- Speaker #0
And we also see it with digital subcultures, right? Like the word delulu.
- Speaker #1
Yes. Meaning delusional.
- Speaker #0
Right. That was actually born in the hyper specific world of K-pop fandoms. And if you look at how linguistic isolation works in, say, a K-pop discord server, it's. fascinating.
- Speaker #1
It really is.
- Speaker #0
You have thousands of fans interacting constantly, often across completely different time zones. It creates this intense linguistic greenhouse effect.
- Speaker #1
A greenhouse effect. I love that.
- Speaker #0
Yeah.
- Speaker #1
Because an inside joke or even just a typo gets repeated hundreds of times a day.
- Speaker #0
Exactly. And within a week, it solidifies into a permanent noun for that specific community.
- Speaker #1
But that greenhouse effect also highlights a massive problem. When a word like Delulu suddenly explodes out of Discord and onto a global platform. The algorithm gets all the credit for making it viral.
- Speaker #0
Right. TikTok or Instagram gets the glory.
- Speaker #1
Yes. And the original creators, whether that's the K-pop community or ballroom culture or AAVE, they just become completely invisible.
- Speaker #0
The erasure is profound. The platform becomes the perceived author and the actual originating community disappears from the narrative entirely.
- Speaker #1
Which is why, for you, the listener, especially if you are leading a brand or trying to engage with youth culture, this distinction is critical. Ben Kauenberg makes it very clear. Knowing where a word actually comes from is the line between genuine cultural understanding and careless, often offensive, appropriation.
- Speaker #0
Yeah, you cannot ethically borrow the cultural cachet of a word while ignoring the people who actually built the culture. But if these words are coming from these deeply rooted subcultures, it really begs the question, why does it feel like the language is changing completely every single week.
- Speaker #1
It's so fast.
- Speaker #0
I swear, by the time a word makes it to my radar, it's already considered humiliating to say out loud.
- Speaker #1
Well, what you're experiencing is the unprecedented speed of the modern slang lifecycle. Because, I mean, youth slang has always changed, obviously. But what is entirely new is the technological engine driving the distribution today.
- Speaker #0
Right.
- Speaker #1
We are looking at a system of forces working together to accelerate language at a pace that traditional linguists have just never seen before.
- Speaker #0
Let's dissect those engines a bit because the research identifies a few very specific drivers. The first one is short form video, TikTok, Instagram reels, YouTube shorts.
- Speaker #1
Yep, the big three.
- Speaker #0
They are fundamentally built to reward massive, rapid repetition. A single audio clip or a catchy phrase can be reproduced millions of times in a week. And with every iteration, the context shifts just a tiny bit.
- Speaker #1
And alongside that algorithm, you have the streamer ecosystem. Platforms like Twitch and YouTube, you have creators broadcasting live, talking directly to their audience for like eight to ten hours a day.
- Speaker #0
That is so much talking.
- Speaker #1
It is. And when you speak for that long and your audience is interacting with you in a live chat, it creates this intense parasocial relationship. You naturally develop inside jokes.
- Speaker #0
Right.
- Speaker #1
Those jokes get clipped, those clips turn into memes, and suddenly they're everyday vocabulary for millions of kids. That pipeline is exactly how terms like Riz, Phantom Tax, and Glaze went completely mainstream.
- Speaker #0
Wait, wait, let me pause you there. Phantom Tax. Is that like literal financial jargon being repurposed?
- Speaker #1
No.
- Speaker #0
Like the word farming?
- Speaker #1
Not quite, though I do love that theory. Phantom Tax actually comes from a specific group of streamers. There's a creator named Phantom, and he had a running joke where he would jokingly tax his friend Kai Senat by stealing a piece of his food during live broadcasts.
- Speaker #0
Oh, wow. Really?
- Speaker #1
Yeah. And because millions of kids watch these streams religiously, phantom tax quickly became a universal term for taking a little bit of your friend's food. It's a hyper-specific inside joke that's scaled globally.
- Speaker #0
That is wild.
- Speaker #1
And glaze, in this context, comes from the idea of a donut glaze. It means to coat someone in sugary compliments or to overpraise them to a really embarrassing degree.
- Speaker #0
OK, that makes perfect sense now. I've heard that and had no idea what it meant. And the research also points out that gaming communities don't just provide words, right? They provide entire linguistic structures. Like the example used is the word farming. Originally, that just meant doing a repetitive task in a video game to get gold or resources. But now it's evolved into aura farming.
- Speaker #1
Yes. Aura farming is such a brilliant evolution. It means deliberately acting a certain way, maybe being mysterious or aloof to cultivate a sense of coolness or mystique in real life.
- Speaker #0
So they've taken a digital utility term from like World of Warcraft and applied it to real world social status.
- Speaker #1
Exactly. But all this hyper visibility leads directly to rapid exhaustion. By the time a social media manager at a corporate brand spots a word, you know, drafts a campaign around it, gets legal approval. and pushes it live.
- Speaker #0
The word is effectively dead.
- Speaker #1
It is an agonizing timeline for brands. Van Kouwenberg outlines this exact life cycle in four distinct steps. Step one is creation. That's when the word emerges in a specific community with deep context. Step two is virality. Creators reuse it, audiences remix it, and it becomes flexible cultural material.
- Speaker #0
And then comes step three, adult and brand adoption.
- Speaker #1
The kiss of death.
- Speaker #0
The absolute kiss of death. This is when parents start saying at the dinner table, journalists write think pieces about it, and fast food brands put it in their social media copy. It's like putting a fashion trend cycle on fast forward. The second a trend hits the mainstream department store, the cool kids burn their clothes.
- Speaker #1
That is exactly what happens. Because step three instantly triggers step four, which is death, irony, or transformation.
- Speaker #0
Right.
- Speaker #1
The word either disappears entirely. It gets absorbed into boring everyday language or it survives strictly as an ironic joke. Because once the adults understand the code, the handshake is compromised.
- Speaker #0
It has zero value as an in-group signal anymore.
- Speaker #1
Exactly.
- Speaker #0
And if meaning is entirely dependent on this fragile high-speed context, then it makes total sense why corporate marketing attempts feel so grating. They're trying to freeze a moving target.
- Speaker #1
Oh, absolutely.
- Speaker #0
And there is no better example of this contextual chaos than Dictionary.com's 2025 Word of the Year. We really need to talk about 67.
- Speaker #1
67, pronounced six-seven.
- Speaker #0
I am still genuine baffled by this. Why would a dictionary pick a random number over a real word? I mean, traditional linguists must have been pulling their hair out over this choice. Oh,
- Speaker #1
it definitely caused a stir. But it was a profound acknowledgement of how language is shifting. 67 originated from a song called Doot Doot by an artist named Skrilla, where he repeats the number.
- Speaker #0
Okay.
- Speaker #1
Then it got tied to the basketball player, LaMelo Ball, purely because his height happens to be 6'7".
- Speaker #0
Wait, just because of his height?
- Speaker #1
Literally just his height. That spawned a series of basketball edit videos on TikTok and eventually a viral clip of someone dubbed the 67 Kid. By 2025, it was just ubiquitous in Gen Alpha spaces.
- Speaker #0
Okay, but what does it actually do in a sentence? Like if I say 67, what information am I conveying to you? Well,
- Speaker #1
that's the trap we discussed earlier. You're looking for a definition where there isn't one. The research points out that its actual meaning is practically nothing.
- Speaker #0
No.
- Speaker #1
Nothing. Kids use it to mean so-so, or they use it as a completely random answer to a math question just to interrupt a classroom. Dictionary.com chose it precisely because its cultural relevance did not depend on a clear definition.
- Speaker #0
Wow.
- Speaker #1
It represented a total surrender to context over definition.
- Speaker #0
So if I walk up to a group of teenagers today, skip the word riz and just confidently say 67, am I suddenly... Culturally relevant.
- Speaker #1
I wouldn't recommend it.
- Speaker #0
Yeah.
- Speaker #1
First, because the meaning isn't in the number itself. The meaning is purely in recognizing the reference. It's a signal that says, hey, I am immersed in the exact same digital ecosystem you are. But more importantly, because of that rapid life cycle we talked about, the moment adults and younger kids started saying 67, the originators immediately pivoted.
- Speaker #0
Let me guess, to a new number.
- Speaker #1
Yep. They started saying 41 instead. just to stay one step ahead of the outsiders.
- Speaker #0
That is wild. It proves the point perfectly, though. Slang is no longer designed to communicate information. It is a moving target designed to create intentional confusion. And we see a different kind of confusion with the other major case study in the research, which is BrainRot, Oxford's 2024 Award of the Year.
- Speaker #1
Yeah, BrainRot is fascinating because unlike 67, It sounds like exactly what it is. Right. But the context still shifts dramatically. It can literally mean low-quality, mind-numbing internet content. Or it can describe the physical, zombie-like habit of scrolling through that content for hours. But most often today, it's used as a highly self-aware ironic joke about being chronically online.
- Speaker #0
It reminds me of how the research describes words like sigma or delulu. Like a kid can call someone sigma and it might be a massive compliment or a completely sarcastic joke or a deep cutting insult. It entirely depends on their tone of voice, the platform they're on and the power dynamic between the two speakers.
- Speaker #1
Exactly. Understanding the word is not the same as understanding the message.
- Speaker #0
Which brings us to the ultimate challenge for the listener. If you're a brand, a leader, or just an adult trying to navigate this space, borrowing this vocabulary is pretty much a guaranteed misfire.
- Speaker #1
It really is.
- Speaker #0
So the only logical alternative is to step back and study the ecosystem first. You have to know the history of the word before you put it on a billboard.
- Speaker #1
And that is precisely Van Kallenberg's first principle for navigating this space. Understand before you use, you have to know where the term came from, who originally used it. And whether its meaning has already shifted.
- Speaker #0
Right.
- Speaker #1
If you don't know the deep history of the word, you have absolutely no business putting it in a marketing campaign.
- Speaker #0
And building on that, if the meaning changes based on the platform, then principle two has to be about reading the room, right?
- Speaker #1
Yes.
- Speaker #0
Like a joke that works perfectly between two friends on Discord is going to sound completely unhinged coming from a bank's official account or, you know, in a PowerPoint presentation from a 50-year-old CEO.
- Speaker #1
Absolutely unhinged. So the second principle is observe the community. Slang belongs to context and relationships. It just doesn't scale neatly into corporate environments.
- Speaker #0
Van Kouwenberg uses an analogy in the text for this that is so vivid and so excruciating. I honestly haven't stopped thinking about it since I read it.
- Speaker #1
Oh, the bedroom analogy.
- Speaker #0
Yes. He says a brand using youth slang is like an adult walking into a teenager's bedroom and officially announcing that the party is now lit.
- Speaker #1
It's a painful visual, isn't it?
- Speaker #0
It is agonizing because the grammar is technically correct. The word is used in the right structural context, but the mere presence of the adult saying it makes the entire situation awkward.
- Speaker #1
Right.
- Speaker #0
The party instantly stops being lit the second the adult announces it.
- Speaker #1
It's the ultimate violation of the social code, which leads directly to the third and most important principle for brands. Never force relevance. You do not become young by borrowing a young person's vocabulary.
- Speaker #0
That is a profound takeaway for anyone listening. True relevance doesn't come from sounding like a teenager. It comes from understanding what actually matters to them.
- Speaker #1
Their anxieties, their humor, their values.
- Speaker #0
Exactly. And demonstrating that understanding through your actions, your products, and your decisions, you have to use your own authentic voice. Trying to wear their language like a costume just exposes how disconnected you really are.
- Speaker #1
If we synthesize everything we've discussed today, the ultimate lesson here is that language is a mirror of social dynamics. You have to respect the boundary it creates.
- Speaker #0
Right.
- Speaker #1
You can observe the digital secret handshake. You can learn a ton about the culture by studying it. But you should never try to hack your way inside using words you haven't earned the cultural right to use.
- Speaker #0
It all circles back to that frozen room we talked about at the start. When you drop that vocabulary word and everyone stares at you, it's not because you mispronounced it. It's because you tried to buy your way into a culture using a currency that just isn't yours.
- Speaker #1
And we really have to remember that the speed at which this currency changes is only going to increase. as digital platforms continue to optimize for acceleration.
- Speaker #0
Which leaves me with a final lingering question to ponder. Something for you, the listener. The mull over long after this deep dive ends.
- Speaker #1
Right.
- Speaker #0
If digital algorithms are making slang universal almost instantly, forcing young people to constantly invent new absurd codes and pivot from 67 to 41 just to maintain their exclusive spaces, what happens when they get tired of running?
- Speaker #1
Oh, that's interesting.
- Speaker #0
Right. Will we eventually see youth culture abandon digital slang altogether? Will they retreat back to hyperlocal, offline, spoken dialects that algorithms simply cannot scrape, steal, or commodify?
- Speaker #1
Now, that is a fascinating thought. If the Internet steals every word you create, maybe the ultimate rebellion is just logging off entirely.
- Speaker #0
We will definitely have to wait and see. Thanks for joining us on this deep dive. Keep listening, keep learning, and maybe double check. before you tell your teenage kids that their outfit is giving.
