Here are two youth-slang quizzes you can try:
- a U.S. one and
- a U.K. one.
On the U.S. one, I missed two out of twenty. On the U.K. one, I missed eight out of ten. I’m familiar with some of the U.S. words, but I’ve never heard of any of the U.K. ones. But then, I’m fairly new to being aware of the latter’s established slang like chuffed (“very pleased”) and knackered (“exhausted,” “damaged”; via The Office [UK]).
U.S. youth slang
- a beat box: Why, I remember back in the olden days of the early ’90s when we called this a human beat box, as opposed to a beat box (“portable stereo”).
- to chunk the deuce: I get the “two” fingers, but “chunk”?
- a dot-gone: probably for the post-teen crowd
- fives
- to gank
- ginormous adj.: This has become pretty common.
- a grade digger: I don’t like this because it sounds like it comes from “grave digger,” not “gold digger.”
- Hasselhoffing n.
- a jabroni
- a January joiner
- LOL: This is well established. But if you aren’t laughing out loud, aren’t you smiling?
- sauce adj.
- a serial chiller
- to shop naked
- a soul patch: This was recently added to America’s Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary.
- to tag
- Texas tea: This is used in the theme song to the 1962 TV show The Beverly Hillbillies. Is the term making a comeback?
- to trip: This is another dephrasing of a phrasal verb (trip out), like cave (cave in, figuratively), freak (freak out), chill (chill out), crank it (crank it up), etc.
- unprotected sleep
- to wig: This is yet another dephrasing of a phrasal verb (wig out).
U.K. youth slang
- bare adj.
- to bosh
- chenzed adj.
- confuzzled adj.
- dekecking n. I’m guessing keck means “trousers.” (Nope, it’s kecks.)
- fetch adj.: From the U.S. movie Mean Girls. I assume the word is from the old-fashioned fetching.
- a flim
- a grimmer
- gopping adj.
- hollage n.
- a McFittie
- a meg
- moobs n.
- p . . . [followed by] . . . orn adj. [Sorry, I get enough of that kind of spam-comment here already without including such terms in posts.]
For British youth slang, see also: