As any good descriptive linguist will tell you, slang is and always has been a valid part of language. In the Victorian era, for example, you might say, “My chuckaboo is smothering a parrot” to describe a good friend who was sipping on an absinthe neat. And if you happened to utter that sentence around someone who wasn’t well-versed in the vernacular, their only recourse would be to ask what on Earth you were talking about.
Fortunately, we now have Google to save us from letting on that we can’t keep up with what the cool kids are saying these days. So which current slang creates the most confusion among the uninitiated? Digital jigsaw puzzle platform I’m a Puzzle compiled a list of 200 common slang terms and then analyzed Google search data to find out which ones people looked up most often throughout 2021.
The top 30 is an entertaining mixture of expressions that can mostly be traced to social media. Some are specific to TikTok: FYP is an initialism for “For You Page,” the TikTok feed that delivers an endless stream of videos curated to your interests. DC stands for “dance credit,” which you might see in a TikTok description to acknowledge the person who made up the routine being performed in the video.
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Other entries, though popularized by social media, technically predate it. The first instance of GOAT, an acronym for “greatest of all time,” is from 1992: Muhammad Ali’s wife, Lonnie Ali, incorporated a company called “G.O.A.T. Inc.” to manage and license her husband’s intellectual properties. Stan, which describes any devoted fan of a celebrity, was coined by Eminem in his 2000 song “Stan,” about an obsessed Eminem fan (named Stan).
Many terms on the list, from bae to finna, come from African American Language (AAL)—also commonly known as African American English (AAE) and African American Vernacular English (AAVE)—an English dialect spoken by Black Americans. These terms’ prominence in mainstream slang can be interpreted as both a testament to America’s growing acceptance of AAL and also to its ongoing cultural appropriation of it.
Put your modern slang knowledge to the test below, and see more popular terms here.
