Gen X

Here is my list of things I’ve been fantasizing about getting for Christmas, in no particular order: encyclopedia set, piano, record player, landline. In other words, I want 1989 for Christmas. I’m yearning for an analog world. For tactile experiences. Cool piano keys I can stumble over. Encyclopedias I can flip through, getting lost in whatever the pages land on when I open the book. I yearn for the stereo sound of a record when an entire side has played, uninterrupted. I want people to have to reach me on my terms, when I’m home or available, not at any and all times. Growing up in the 1980s and 90s, I spent a lot of time alone with my thoughts, or running around wild with siblings, friends and cousins.

People whose minds stopped evolving 20 years ago are having a snit because the Cambridge Dictionary, the world’s largest online lexicography, has added a few Gen-Z and Gen-Alpha slang terms to its more than 6,000 entries. The most controversial include “skibidi,” “delulu” and “tradwife.” You could argue that the latter is more of a millennial linguistic formulation for the extremely online, but the other two are definitely youth newspeak. Tradwife, as a term and a viral activity, is going to stick around for a while. “Skibidi,” derived from the YouTube Skibidi Toilet meme, is a word with as many meanings as “aloha” and “shalom,” and has the potential for a generation-spanning shelf life.