KIM MACDONALD: Teenagers are the evil masterminds of modern language and they’ve struck again

Skibidi! Do you know what I mean?

Probably not, because in the modern world of slang, skibidi means many things.

Those evil masterminds of the modern language — teenagers — have done it again, creating a whole new lexicon designed to make you feel older than Carol from payroll.

You can use the word to express something good, or bad, or mad, but mostly it is a filler used to pad out a comment, like adding flour to a stew.

The word gets even more bizarre considering the nuances change with age.

The word is used by kids aged under 13 in a bid to sound older and cool. It is used by adults to sound younger and cool.

It is occasionally still used by the original creators — teens — but they only say it ironically, to make fun of the word’s cringe factor, as well as the kids and adults who are trying to sound like them.

And in the teen world, pulling that off that makes them cool. Go figure.

Falling into the same pattern are the words “sigma”, which means cool, and “Ohio”, which means weird, because apparently strange things happen in America’s Mid-West.

The last time I wrote about modern slang, I didn’t think there could be a more devastating term than “non-playing character”.

Imagine getting labelled an “NPC” — as if your relevance to the world is no more than the video game characters that are not controlled by the player or AI.

Well, it gets worse. Now there is “Unc”, which is short for uncle, deriving from African American Vernacular English, but now used in a derogatory way.

It’s a nod to the old uncle who still thinks he is young and fresh, like the old guy who does the disco finger at weddings.

Who is an Unc? Apparently, Eminem.

Yes, the rapper who was once so controversial his songs were banned from some radio stations. The man politicians tried to bar from entering Australia in 2001. The man who redefined the rap genre.

Yet teens consider him to be so out of it these days that he is widely referred to as “Unc rapper Eminem” on TikTok.

There are a lot of terms relating to appearance. The term “look-maxing” — invented when teen boys discovered hygiene — refers to taking care of yourself in the hopes of looking better.

This goes hand in hand with “scentmaxing”, which involves expensive cologne rather than something that smells like a toilet freshener.

A form of look-maxing is mewing, a practice involving the scraping of fingers from the chin to the ear to accentuate the jawline and prevent a double chin.

If you respond to someone with the action, but no words, it means: “Can’t talk — I’m mewing.”

If you achieve this, you might be “mogging”. That is the act of looking better than someone else.

Teens don’t believe in false modesty, so it is fine to point out your superior appearance by saying “I mog you”.

Having a “gyatt,” which is a big bottom and generally regarded as a good thing, might help in that regard.

It might even you help you “rizz someone up” — which is using charisma to flirt. If you’ve game in the regard, you’ve “got rizz”.

To use an Unc phrase, back when I was a teen when you wanted to recognise someone’s effort, you could give the term “good on you” a hip edge by saying “onya”.

If you really wanted to be wild back then, you could throw all grammatical rules to the wind by recognising the efforts of two or more people with “onyas”.

And if you were lucky enough to have a friend called Sonya, you would become the legend of the lunch hour for saying “Onya Sonya.” (I don’t want to boast but I am speaking from experience).

But in modern slang, congratulatory terms seem to have clashed with a cookbook.

“Ate” means that something has been well done, as in “she ate that and left no crumbs.”

Likewise, “cook” or cooking” also means to do something well, as in “I’m going to cook this test,” or “she is cooking.”

But just to make things even more difficult, cooking can also mean the reverse, to describe something that is not done well, as in “that test cooked me, it ate me alive and spat me out.”

Skibidi indeed.

*Please note, that no teens were harmed in the writing of this opinion piece.