Chicks against bumps

The other day, while browsing the comments of some musical discussions on the VKontakte social network, I encountered a cry from the soul of a young user.

Here it is, in its entirety (preserving the author’s spelling and punctuation):
“… Traitors with blood on their shirts often drove after concerts and were injured. There was only one punk among them and I joined later, punks aren’t that tough mahachi… My first meeting with them started when the cat-powered writing on my t-shirt looked like their umc (underground mosh team). ), we flew about it , then I just flew into the circle pit and less dangerous moves, and then before everyone in the circle rushed to each other, the person asked: “Do you want it too?)) neck” – and so they were on the neck with me and laughed …”

After rereading the message three times, I asked myself one question: In what language actually?! I was angry that these free people were soon taking over government institutions and that we couldn’t ask them for a pension without a phrasebook or sciatica salve. Then I thought. I wonder how youth slang has graduated over time.

It is clear that each generation in adolescence invented something of its own. Such words have many purposes – both the desire to isolate oneself from the adult world and the need to show off in front of less cool peers. It is also a way of describing “our”.

That is, young slang has the same functions as ordinary human language – communicative, selective and others.

But it is developing in an interesting way. So, for example, in the 70s and 80s, in the days of Soviet censorship, the vocabulary of youth coincided, if not completely, with the colloquial expressions of underground figures of that time. Of course mostly rockers. Hippies, dudes and other punks. And it consisted mainly of anglicisms. Many fashionable words were tracing paper directly from the English – “girl”, “flat”, “shoes”.

My generation (children born in the 80s) grew up in a time when all bans were lifted and Western subcultures were no longer exotic. And by all social laws, anglicisms immediately disappeared from slang. In other words, forbidden fruit was sweet as long as it was forbidden.

But in our youth, words and spin-offs came from the emerging IT subculture of our youth vocabulary. There was no mass internet back then and it does not seem necessary or possible to explain to today’s innovator what FIDO and conferences are. Few computer users at that time were a kind of elite, whose vocabulary eventually penetrated wide circles. Then padonkov’s tongue fell on us in a wave (it comes from roughly the same place), remember not at night.

And today, in 2022, everything is back to normal. On the one hand, the state intensifies patriotic rhetoric by glorifying all that is primitive. On the other hand, children begin to speak English. Why? Why? I wrote above: exactly the same. Western culture has not yet been banned, of course, but it is already seen as something exotic in some places.

So its echoes will be heard louder and louder at the household level, thank God we have not yet lived underground.

Also, we must understand that we all live here in the era of postmodernism. Therefore, among today’s youth, Anglicisms are cheerfully mixed with Internet memes and local “gags”.

And also from my personal observations: when a large number of users discovered popular psychology, from there “terminology” spilled into squares and kitchens. This is due, of course, mainly to feminists and some other professionally disturbed groups that are popular with young people. Whatever the text, “toxicity” and “objectification”, as if out of the cradle, these words inspire a baby.

And I call one of my dear interlocutors nothing but a “young abuser”!

True, I have long defined all “harassment” and “misogyny” as parasitic words for myself and only use them in an ironic context.

I can say one thing for sure: Personally, I need not only a translator, but also an explanation team to understand exactly what they are saying. Because I can’t solve it alone.

The author expresses his personal opinion, which may not coincide with the editors’ position.