Your teenager says something was “mid”. Their friend has “no rizz”. Someone in the group chat is “delulu”. And when you ask what any of it means, you get a look that suggests you’ve asked them to explain the internet.
Here’s the reassuring part: you’re not meant to understand it. That’s the point.
Slang has always done two jobs. It’s playful, and it draws a line between the people who belong and the people who don’t. For teenagers, the most important people on the other side of that line are parents and teachers. A word stops working the moment adults start using it properly. That’s why slang moves so fast. It isn’t decline. It’s design.
None of this is new. “Cool” was jazz slang in the 1930s. “Bad” meant good long before today’s teenagers said “sick”. If you grew up in Australia, you may have called something “grouse”, and your parents had no idea what you meant either.
Some of it breaks through. Oxford named “rizz” its Word of the Year in 2023, and “brain rot” in 2024. Dictionary.com chose “67” for 2025, a word that even many teenagers struggle to define. That’s rather the point.
So how do parents keep up? Mostly, they don’t need to.
Don’t use it to fit in. Nothing kills a word faster than a parent saying it. Use it to make them laugh, by all means. That’s a different thing.
Ask, and mean it. “What does that mean?”, asked with real curiosity, turns your teenager into the expert. Most kids enjoy that more than they’ll admit.
Listen for the job, not the word. Most slang does one of a few things: approve, dismiss, exaggerate or tease. You can usually follow the conversation without the dictionary.
The same thing happens at work. Every team has words that tell you who’s been there longest, and new starters who nod along rather than ask. The fix is the same too: ask, and make it easy for others to ask you.
You don’t need to keep up with their slang. You need to keep them talking.
