Are you popping up or being pied?

The new language of love,

What do you do when you’ve been left on ‘delivered’ for two hours? Are you being benched, cushioned, breadcrumbed or, worse still, completely pied? And just when you thought you were about to go from linking to something more serious…

Confused? Unless you’re part of Generation Z – or perhaps one of their parents – it may well be baffling to discover that this is common dating parlance among our youngest adult generation. It means that a Whatsapp message has been left unread, the sender in question is concerned that they are being strung along by the would-be receiver and may be about to be dumped. Welcome to the world of 21st-century relationships, where simple courtship is out and a new maze of dating lingo has taken its place.

For the befuddled, or those who thought there were just two stages to dating (doing it, or not), I’ll elucidate: romance for late teens and early 20-somethings now has more levels than Dante’s Purgatorio.

It looks a little like this: someone will ‘pop up’ – that is, make a first approach by messaging on social media (usually Snapchat or Instagram). Numbers will then be exchanged, to reach the ‘talking to’ stage. This is not as straightforward as literally

speaking with another person, but denotes the groundwork of a possible real-life union being laid. If successful, that will lead to ‘linking’ – meeting up with said digital correspondent in the flesh – before fully fledged ‘dating’ can take place.

That doesn’t necessarily mean being boyfriend and girlfriend, or boyfriend/boyfriend or girlfriend/girlfriend, though; things could simply become a ‘situationship’, which is a relationship but, crucially, not a relationship. As Judith Woods, Telegraph columnist and mother of 12- and 19-year-old daughters, puts it, ‘If you have to ask what a situationship is, you’re too old to know – or too old to have one.’

If moving from first meet to actual courting sounds complicated, break-ups are worse, with more words for severing ties with a love interest (benching, cushioning, pieing, ghosting, and so on) than the Inuits have for snow.

Furthermore, the pandemic, too, has left its mark on dating – or, to use its official name, ‘pandating’. It is now possible to ‘Fauci’ someone – not date that person because he or she is not taking Covid-19 and its associated precautions seriously enough. For those who remember the brief phase of a ‘1661’ (16 from the back, 61 from the front), ‘maskfishing’ is perhaps the

modern equivalent – beautiful eyes (above a mask), less seductive once said covering has been pulled down.

It’s enough to put you off the dating scene altogether. But ’twas ever thus – at least according to Susie Dent, lexicographer supreme and doyenne of Countdown’s dictionary corner. Terms like ‘going out’ only came to the fore ‘in the early 1900s, in the sense of a romantic assignation or relationship’ – before then, she explains, one would ‘go with’ another, as of around the 1830s. ‘Woo’ is thought to be one of the earliest written love terms, its first mention being in around 1290, while ‘make love’ replaced it in 1560, only becoming more sexual in meaning in the early 20th century. Other locutions have shifted, too: spoon – now more commonly used to mean snuggling behind a partner in bed – was, in 1877, ‘to woo in a silly or sentimental way’, according to the Oxford Dictionary of Modern Slang.

As for misspelt Snapchat exchanges and made-up words between current Gen Z daters – well, just take a look at the ‘firkytoodling’ (that’s energetic flirting) of the Victorians, or talk of ‘hot cockles’ or ‘fandango de pokum’, as sex was described in the 1500s and 1800s respectively. ‘I think there’s a surprising amount of similarity in dating slang across the centuries,’ Dent says. ‘The “snacc” [someone you find very attractive] of Gen Z, for example, is little different to the “biscuit” of the 19th century. I like the creativity of some modern dating vocab – “ghosting” [disappearing without trace from someone you were seeing] is so obvious but also very pithy.’ Plus, some words of old still remain: ‘“Simp” as a noun is a century old and is short for a fool or simpleton; the verb “simping” – now beloved by under-25s – partly carries on that theme.’

Meanwhile, though messages on Snapchat aren’t going to hang about (a function of the platform is that they dissolve within seconds), they are, says Tania O’donnell, author of A History of Courtship, ‘sort of harking back to that idea of being able to say something better with the written word than in person’. Pre-industrial Revolution, that might come via letter, while the Victorians were wont to send cards. ‘You’d have informal letters pinging back and forth that would permit you to know whether someone had had an escapade at a seaside one summer and had wrecked their reputation that way,’ says O’donnell.

‘The actual impulses and feelings behind the way people interact haven’t really changed that much,’ she adds: boy meets girl, sparks fly, amorous brains attempt utterances. Up to a point, that is. ‘There’s a lot less romance at the beginning [of a relationship] because it’s much less in-person and so much over text,’ says 18-year-old Litzi. Before, you might meet someone at a local dance and have little means for communication between meetings beyond the odd phone call – or before that, love letter. ‘Now, you’re texting 24/7, all the time… even before you start dating you’re talking constantly on the phone [via social media],’ says Litzi. ‘It makes people a lot more anxious about relationships because people read into [things] a lot’; if someone doesn’t reply to a message in a timely manner in minutes, ‘you freak out’. Indeed, the politics of time left between responses can be a huge factor in making or breaking a Gen Z pairing. ‘I know a lot of people who, if you leave them on delivered for 15 minutes, they’ll do it for 20,’ Litzi says. ‘It’s quite petty sometimes.’

Elsie, also 18, agrees that many of her cohort’s struggles to find love are caused by ‘social media, unfortunately’. A fifth of 18- to 24-year-olds think a text conversation counts as a date, according to figures from Google, while the generation is reportedly less sexually inclined than their forebears, earning them the tag of ‘puriteens’. In a world where

Covid has left its mark: it is now possible to ‘Fauci’ or ‘mask-fish’ someone

nothing is really off limits, and social consciousness appears to be at an all-time high, physical intimacy has slipped down the list of priorities, with nearly six in 10 students saying making friends at university is more important than finding a sexual partner, a report from the Higher Education Policy Unit found earlier this year. A quarter of the 1,000 students surveyed arrived at university having never kissed anyone, while 43 per cent said they had never had sex.

Digital platforms add a new barrier to would-be couples flourishing compared to her parents’ generation, Elsie adds. Plus, they remove the kind of spontaneity most dream of. ‘It’s almost a façade, when you [talk] on social media, because even if you’re having a conversation… you have the time to think over a reply. The only real way to get to know somebody is face-to-face, because then you get to know who they are.’

The likes of Snapchat and Instagram have become a crutch, too; most ‘popping up’ comes when someone has met another in person through mutual friends, but has been too shy to make their approach. ‘I really hope that I just meet somebody in real life,’ Elsie says.