A Tower of Babel
This article first appeared in the Minden Times in August 2024.
As a follow-up to my rather dense, I’ll admit, last column on Freire’s idea of naming your world to change it, a guest essay by Stephen Marche in the July 30th New York Times added an interesting perspective. His point is that listening to teenage language helps him understand how that generation sees the world.
Marche has a teenage son so he has an inside peek at the world of teen slang. I envy him, because I have no strategy for not appearing hopelessly old and dumb when the younger generation uses words that mean nothing to me. I try to translate using context and body language, as I would any foreign language, but the minimalism of much intergenerational chit-chat often renders that strategy unfruitful. And if I ask for translation, ooh, the pain of enduring the respectfully rolled eyes and somewhat managed patronizing tone – from grandkids who kinda know me one thing, quite another, immeasurably more debasing, from someone to whom I am only an old woman with grey hair and wrinkles.
But to Marche’s point about what he perceives to be his son’s generation’s world view as reflected in their slang, he starts slow and easy with ‘dope’ replacing the ‘cool’ of our generation, which even I know. He believes his son’s generation re-names more abundantly than prior adolescents because the world has become more alien and worrisome, ‘characterized’, he says, ‘online and off, by collapsing institutions, erosions in trust and a loss of faith in a shared sense of meaning.’
Therefore his son’s slang includes ‘mid’, which references anything ‘average or slightly below. You cannot really complain about them, but they produce no joy.’ The mush of mediocrity. I always tended toward being a ‘tough love’ mama, and I thought we were doing children an incredible harm when the school system embraced never failing students. I absolutely believe that you learn more from failure than success. I absolutely embrace striving for perfection, even while acknowledging that it an ideal, a goal, never a reality. I absolutely think nature is a meritocracy, and human nature should be in sync with that.
‘Glazed’ (as in donuts) ‘indicates a gilding of information’. Spin, in political terminology. Inauthenticity in psycho-speak. Ambiguity and unreliability in any language. This perspective does explain a lot of current inaction. If I can’t trust language, why should I bother to talk? If the same word means one thing to me and something entirely different, perhaps antithetical, to you, how can we have a conversation? People not being able to talk to each other, if I remember my Sunday School lesson about the Tower of Babel properly, meant that people could not work together effectively – Roger that, in about one million applications that spring immediately to mind! The intent of the introduction of multiple languages (God’s idea) that kiboshed the building of the tower, which was to be tall enough to evade a second flood, was to punish people for thinking they could outwit His plans for them. To put them in their subsidiary place. Hmm, that also resonates with about a million current circumstances where the invisible hand does not start with G.
‘Sus’ in Marche’s son’s world, ‘is short for suspicious or suspect’. In my time, ‘suss’ was a word I learned from a black woman of American culture that meant ‘figure it out’ as a verb and ‘here’s what I make of it’ as a noun. It is illuminating that in the span of, say, fifty years the world has gone from being a problem to be solved to a mysterious and probably malicious presence. The loss of a sense of agency, if I understand this correctly, is a knife to my heart. If a sense of agency, and ‘I’ that can ‘do’ (which certainly was the meaning of suss to me), is what differentiates human beings from other sentient creatures, as Freire holds, then these adolescents are messaging they feel dehumanized, objects rather than subjects in their world.
Marche’s last slang word is ‘based – short for based in fact or based in reality’. I have no idea why this is Marche’s favourite slang word, because to me it sums up all the wrongs that necessitated the previous words – the theft of the joy of accomplishment, the destruction of collaborative conversation, the gutting of human agency itself. Because if you can’t trust words, how can you know the extent to which the facts or reality your perception is based on is what the other perceives? I hear ‘based’ as a cry for help as a floundering swimmer goes down for the third time.
Freire believed naming the world was the first and necessary step toward changing it. Marche’s perspective seems to be that naming to reflect the malfunctions of the world is good enough in itself. Maybe – I hope so – there’s more going on with his son’s re-naming than he perceives.
