Trolling for understanding with millennials

As much as it pains me to admit it, I don’t understand the younger generation. Literally.

Last week, for instance, I was stumped by an op-ed piece in USA Today accusing Republicans of “waging war on millennials.” The writer, who probably is a lot younger than I, referred to one candidate as being “lit.” He described the candidate’s performance as being “fire.” He used such phrases as “your fam turnt,” “mad AF,” “clap back at the ballot box” and “trolling them out.”

All of which probably was very informative for millennial readers, assuming there are millennials who read newspapers. But I still don’t know if I should vote for a lit candidate or how that might affect my fam turnt if I did.

I’m not sure when I became a victim of the generational communication gap, but maybe it could be traced to when my kids became teenagers and began using words like “phat,” “chill,” “bad” (meaning good) and “hang” (which had nothing to do with attaching pictures to walls). One of their favorite words was “word.” I still have no idea what that meant, but they said it all the time before they finally stopped talking to me altogether.

Some of my lack of comprehension has to do with Twitter. When people started communicating their most profound thoughts in 140 characters or less, they created energy-saving acronyms. They weren’t the first to us acronyms; RSVP, BYOB and SNAFU have been around for quite some time. But now it’s probably possible to write the entire Gettysburg Address using only acronyms; if Lincoln had a Twitter account he would have been able to scribble “Four score and seven years ago” as “FSASYA.”

I could, I suppose, try to be conversant with younger people by using the Twitter-to-English online translator, which is how I discovered AFAIK means “as far as I know” and G2G is “got to go.” But it’s probably best not to try faking it.

You may think you know that SOS means “save our ships,” but in the Twitter phrase book it means “someone over shoulder.” A classic example of confused communication is the woman who sent a tweet to her daughter concerning a relative’s death and ended it with “LOL,” which she assumed meant “lots of love.” Shocking the daughter, who interpreted it as “laughing out loud.”

Generations communicating in ways that other generations don’t understand is not a bad thing, of course. It’s their right. Possibly their duty. My generation puzzled my parent’s generation with “outasight,” “what’s the buzz?” and “grody to the max.”

I think I’d be suspicious of a millennial who used words like “grody.” I might even have to troll him out.