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The study of slang dialog is fascinating because it often shows far reaching shifts in culture that can’t always be easily identified.
Linguistics expert Adam Aleksic is a Harvard grad with a degree in Linguistics and he’s amassed a huge following across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube by explaining interesting phenomenon like the rise of Gen Z using video game terms in real life as slang.
In a recent clip that has amassed millions of views across Instagram and TikTok, Adam explains how this is “an entirely new etymological category drawing on our shared experience of video games.”
He equates the current Gen Z slang using terms that are ubiquitous to gaming as similar to how slang related to baseball are omnipresent in everyday life. He uses the examples of ‘Swing and a miss’ and ‘Out of left field’ which, as he points out, mean something specific in baseball but are used in an array of ways in normal conversation.
Gen Z using gaming slang like calling someone an ‘NPC’ or saying they’re going “on a side quest” are just coopting language from a shared experience which, in this case, is playing video games.
Adam Aleksic explains that societies “consistently create metaphors out of shared experiences” and then goes on to explain it’s because that is how people best understand each other, through shared experience.
He believes that terms like ‘noob’ and ‘OP’ will take on more serious connotations in the future as they become more prevalent which may or may not be true, only time will tell.