Teenager-Speak Comes Early

Over the past year, due to COVID-19, my 9 yo daughter has switched to a new group of friends in the apartment (One-line reason: You play with whoever comes down). As a result, her new group of friends is a motley collection of kids (at times, it even includes boys, something unimaginable in the pre-COVID era) in a wide-ranging age group of 7 to 15. And therein lie the origins of this blog.

 

The older kids know far better English and are good at, er, insulting. The younger ones, including my daughter, pick a bit of the English and all of the insults. And when we went into lockdown again, I got to experience everything she’d learnt. Terms of addressing like “bro”, “dude”, and the South Indian “da”. She used them tentatively with me at first (not “da”, the other two), testing the waters. But when I use those terms on her, she’ll snort:

“Adults. Can’t use such words properly, and yet they won’t stop.”

 

Then there are those words which drive all parents up a wall. Yes, I am referring to “relax”, “chill”, and the combo, “chillax”. She’ll use it when I get really angry at her. Just chillax, dad. It’s like a waving a red flag in front of a bull.

 

All her English improvements are, of course, limited to insults and teenager’ish phrases. The other day, she saw me open the fridge, stopped abruptly, and asked what I was doing. “Hunting for food”, I replied. She gave me a very rare look of approval, and stunned me by saying:

“You are like my brother from another mother.”

That she knew the phrase was a revelation (see meaning here). That she could use it right blew me over.

 

Now you’d be thinking that I am being too harsh, but this is the same kid who while watching an obstacle course reality show named Ultimate Beastmaster India, tried to pour scorn on the Indian competitors vis-à-vis their Western counterparts by saying:

“The Americans and Italians have a certain déjà vu. The Indians don’t have any class.”

I asked her whether she knew what “déjà vu” even meant. Of course, she snorted, it means style or class. (My attempt to correct her was dismissed with adults-don’t-know-anything derision).

 

For kids, age is not just a number. It’s a way to indicate seniority over other kids. She’s just 7. She doesn’t even know what negative numbers are. The fun thing is that even that 7 yo will give it back to her, er, elders. One time, to prove that she too was cool, that 7 yo kid told the group that she had a crush on some band’s singer (Probably repeating what her elder sister said). Upon which she was contemptuously told that she was too young to have a crush. Her retort?

“Are you my mother? Telling me what I can or can’t do?”

I have told my daughter that I want daily reports of everything this 7 yo says…

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