--- title: Slang and how it changes with every generation — a lesson of Mova's school · trees and pragmatics description: «Slang and how it changes with every generation», a lesson of the language course of Mova's primary school, sentence by sentence with dependency trees and pragmatics. It begins: Slang is the new, playful, in-group language of a time and a crowd; every generation makes its own, partly so it can sound --- [Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/17-slang-and-how-it-changes-with-every-generation/) [home](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [corpora](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/) / [school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/) / [Language](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/) / Slang and how it changes with every ge… # Slang and how it changes with every generation Lesson 17 of the language course of Mova's primary school: 16 sentences, each with its syntax tree and pragmatics. The lessons are written for Mova, and their agreed trees are part of Mova corpus 0.4 (CC BY-SA 4.0). How Mova does on its tests: [the lesson at school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/school-run/language/17-slang-and-how-it-changes-with-every-generation/). - [0](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/17-slang-and-how-it-changes-with-every-generation/0/) — Slang is the new, playful, in-group language of a time and a crowd; every generation makes its own, partly so it can sound different from its parents. - [1](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/17-slang-and-how-it-changes-with-every-generation/1/) — Picture one pizza and three generations: Grandad says "That's groovy!" (1960s), Mum says "That's cool!" (an old jazz word from the 1930s and 1940s that never died), and Mia says "That's bussin'!" (today, meaning really tasty). - [2](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/17-slang-and-how-it-changes-with-every-generation/2/) — Slang moves fast: when parents start saying "sick" or "lit", young people often drop it and invent something new; but some slang settles down and ends up in dictionaries, like "rizz" (charm), Oxford's Word of the Year for 2023. - [3](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/17-slang-and-how-it-changes-with-every-generation/3/) — Slang is often silly taken word by word: "the bee's knees" (1920s, excellent), "don't have a cow" (calm down), "skibidi" (often just a fun nonsense word); you read the whole phrase, not each word. - [4](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/17-slang-and-how-it-changes-with-every-generation/4/) — Ordinary words drift too: "nice" once meant foolish, and today's slang might be tomorrow's plain word; slang also differs by place, from London's "peng" to Canada's "toque". - [6](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/17-slang-and-how-it-changes-with-every-generation/6/) — Rizz comes from "charisma" and means charm, the knack of getting people to like you; it was the Oxford Word of the Year for 2023. - [7](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/17-slang-and-how-it-changes-with-every-generation/7/) — "No cap" means no lie, for real; in this slang a "cap" is a lie. - [8](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/17-slang-and-how-it-changes-with-every-generation/8/) — Skibidi comes from a 2023 YouTube animated series; kids use it as a fun word that can mean cool, bad or nothing, and it was added to the Cambridge Dictionary in 2025. - [9](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/17-slang-and-how-it-changes-with-every-generation/9/) — "Don't have a cow" is American slang for "don't get so upset"; it became famous through Bart Simpson in the 1990s. - [10](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/17-slang-and-how-it-changes-with-every-generation/10/) — "The bee's knees" and "the cat's pyjamas" meant something excellent in 1920s American slang; they were playful nonsense. - [11](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/17-slang-and-how-it-changes-with-every-generation/11/) — "Sick" meaning great became common in the 1980s and 1990s; "cringe" means embarrassing. - [12](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/17-slang-and-how-it-changes-with-every-generation/12/) — "Lowkey" means a bit or secretly; "highkey" means very or openly. - [13](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/17-slang-and-how-it-changes-with-every-generation/13/) — In Canada a "double-double" is a coffee with two creams and two sugars, and a "toque" is a knitted woolly hat. - [14](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/17-slang-and-how-it-changes-with-every-generation/14/) — "Nice" comes from Latin "nescius", not knowing; in Middle English it meant silly or foolish, later shy, then fussy, and now pleasant. - [15](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/17-slang-and-how-it-changes-with-every-generation/15/) — In London youth slang "peng" means great or good-looking and "bare" means very or lots; in parts of the North "mint" means great and "aye" means yes. - [16](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/17-slang-and-how-it-changes-with-every-generation/16/) — "Rad", short for radical, was 1970s and 1980s American surfer and skater slang for excellent; the ordinary word radical means a very big or extreme change. - ← previous: [Formal and informal: a mate versus the head teacher](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/16-formal-and-informal-a-mate-versus-the-head-teacher/) - next →: [Accents and dialects of Britain and Ireland](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/18-accents-and-dialects-of-britain-and-ireland/) - ↑ back to [Language](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/)