Avo is bougie, lit is basic: millennial slang, decoded
Avo, short for avocado, is now a word in the Merriam-Webster dictionary. Slang is the language of the disenfranchised, popular enough to hit the mainstream. But what are young people really saying?
A few weeks ago, two things happened: Merriam-Webster added the word “avo” to its online dictionary, and I had the sudden thought that I was dying.
OK. We’re all dying. But when part of the way you measure your youth is in how delightfully baffling your speech patterns are to older generations, being assaulted with absolute confusion while trying to suss out why anyone would feel the need to shorten “avocado” to “avo” was like a sledgehammer to the stomach.
Am I getting old? I’d always assumed that slang was the realm of the young. This unrecognizable term looked at first like the wave of a checkered flag in the distance — soon, I panicked, millennials like me will be the ones running behind on the innovations of the English language. Soon, we will be wearing bifocals and peering, stupefied, at our phone screens, trying to figure out just what the heck our niece meant in her latest text.
But can slang as a whole be explained only as a product of different generations?
Slang is trail mix. Different terms are born in different groups and then become popular enough to hit the mainstream — the thing that puts them in the same bag is that slang is the food of the disenfranchised.
That can include young versus old. But a quick dive into the origins of what many call “slang” shows that a huge percentage is terms and phrases taken from AAVE (African American Vernacular English) and Black culture, as well as queer culture — particularly the intersection between the two. Chances are, the cooler a term sounds, the more likely it is that a Black drag queen came up with it. In fact, usually when a slang term drops out of rotation, it’s because non-marginalized or privileged people made it uncool. Case in point: Lit. Lit — an adjective meaning “cool, fun, awesome, etc.” — has been rotting in its grave for many people ever since Donald Trump Jr. used it in a tweet this past summer expressing his excitement that Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy was going to be replaced — a tweet which is even worse in retrospect since the person nominated to be that replacement was Brett Kavanagh. Yikes.
It is no surprise that the marginalized are at the forefront of culture creation. Racial, sexual and gender minorities carve out their own ways of communicating in order to find each other and build communities away from mainstream oppression. However, youth still does play a major part: teenagers create their own language in defiance of their elders. And slang is usually lighthearted in some way. No one needs jokes more than people struggling uphill in a society described mostly by language not constructed for them.
I went on a brief journey of association, posing the question, “What is millennial slang?” to different people in my life in order to see if I agreed with their choices, or if some sort of pattern emerged.
(The following definitions are as I understand the terms, so your mileage may vary!)
My mother, a baby boomer, wanted an explanation for the word “adulting.” It’s a verb for performing regular tasks of adulthood — usually used by early 20-somethings to mockingly brag about how they’re acting “so mature,” when in fact, they do not feel mature at all.
(“Guys, I actually ate two meals today, did the dishes and laundry, I am doing so good at adulting this week.”)
A huge facet of the millennial experience is the difference between how we enact adulthood compared to our parents — when they were our age, baby boomers, for the most part, had an easier time finding full-time jobs that paid living wages, and they were able to pay off things like mortgages or schooling a lot faster.
Millennials, on the other hand, are lucky to afford the occasional slice of avocado toast to lift our sodden spirits, never mind accumulate enough cash to buy a house, or a diamond ring (two industries we are accused of killing!). It’s hard to keep up with the expectations of what an adult should be when you’re doggy-paddling in debt — “adulting” is one way we make light of it.
When asked, my editor prompted me to explain a few common terms she’d heard: “bougie,” “basic” and “extra.”
Bougie can be a descriptor for a place, person, or thing — often food or drink — that is over the top in a pretentious, usually negative way. There’s an implied, unnecessary excess of some kind.
(“I asked Jess if she wanted me to grab her some fries, but she only eats those bougie salads in mason jars from that hipster café now.”)
In some ways, basic is the opposite: it describes something or someone as being boring or having boring taste, liking plain, average, generically popular things.
(“You got a pumpkin spice latte? Girl, you are so basic.”)
Unlike bougie, although extra brings the flair, it’s generally used in an affectionate, if slightly exasperated tone. Extra is bringing the drama for no reason. Extra is vagueposting about your ex on your Instagram story with a dramatic selfie where you’re wearing a tasteful negligee and only half of your elegantly tragic face is visible, with a caption that says, “people claim they love you, but really, they’re just so fake …”
(“Did you see Jane’s post the other night? She is so extra, like, that was obviously about Marsha.”)
Being able to show excess emotion, or have food that’s a little excessively fancy or popular, can be a luxury for a generation that is cash-strapped and at a higher risk for struggling with poor mental health, but it can also be a sign that you’re out of step with the rest of your cohorts. Everyone wants to be a little extra sometimes, and everyone secretly wants to try the bougie food (if someone else is paying), and everyone has that product or food they like that just might make them look a little basic, but being called out on these desires is another thing entirely.
Interestingly though, none of the terms I was prompted to define thus far were ones that would’ve sprung to mind first for me — all of the ones listed so far have been around for years.
Mind you, everyone I’d asked was older than me. All except one.
My brother, 21 years old and straddling the line between millennial and gen Z, was the only one to suggest a term that didn’t feel completely cold in the grave to me: yeet.
Although yeet can be found in a video of a dance that went viral, the version I use 24/7 is based on a six-second vine of a teenager shrieking the word at the top of her lungs as she throws an empty bottle down a hallway. Yeet is both the act of throwing something unwanted, and also an exclamation to give while doing the throwing. It is gloriously evocative.
(“My boyfriend tried to feed me brussels sprouts, but I was like ‘YEET’ and put those straight in the green bin.” Or, “If you get your muddy hands anywhere near me, I am going to yeet you into the afterlife.”)
Who has not wanted to viciously throw something into a crowd of their peers? What millennial has not been handed something that promised to satisfy an inherent thirst burning in their throat, only to find the opportunity utterly empty and devoid of promise?
Am I reading too much into this? Definitely. Is the teenager in the vine probably a gen Z kid even though the vine came out years ago? Yup. But I still can’t help but see that vine as a microcosm of millennial life, and particularly millennials who do belong to a marginalized group: we’ve been handed nothing, and we’re angry about it, and we’re going to chuck that nothing into the ether because we deserve better.
It was weirdly embarrassing to go around asking people for slang, and I could see the same feeling on the faces of all those I posed the question to. Asking for clarity on what a slang word means instantly outs you as not hip enough to figure it out — as someone who isn’t part of the club who understands this word and can use it instinctively .
don’t have “FOMO” (Fear Of Missing Out, used to express the pervasive feeling that others are having more fun than you are, or that you should be socializing more than you currently are). I have Fear Of Using A Cool New Slang Form Wrong In Front Of A Youth And Sounding Like All Those White Girls Did When They Started Calling Everything “Fleek” in 2016 And Ruined It. (Doesn’t make for a very good acronym.)
But not understanding “avo” doesn’t necessarily mean I’m completely out of touch yet. No matter what Merriam-Webster does, most people aren’t so bougie that they need a short form for avocado. Not to throw shade, but that’s kind of extra.
Asking for clarity on what a slang word means instantly outs you as not hip enough to figure it out, as someone who isn’t part of the club