Don’t Be Mogged by a Skibidi Rizzler

How I learned to relax and stop worrying about Gen-Alpha slang

When Charlie, my 13-year-old son, came home from school last week, I asked him the same question I always do. “How was your day?”

“Skibidi toilet,” he said. 

It’s the only answer I’ve been getting from him lately, and I’m never sure how to respond. “Okay, uh… that sounds… is that a good thing or a bad thing?”

He shrugged. “Skibidi,” he repeated.

It can feel like talking with a hormonal alien. He speaks in a weird gibberish that only he and his friends understand. I recognize the “toilet” part of it, but “skibidi”? Unless it’s followed by “—doo-dah, skibidi-day,” I don’t have the faintest idea what the fuck he’s trying to tell me.

Skibidi is just the tip of the Gen-Alpha slang iceberg. Their vernacular is riddled with words that sound like a Klingon playing Scrabble while having a stroke. “Rizzler,” “mogging,” “fanum tax,” “mewing,” “sigma,” “gyatt” and “fanum tax,” to name just a few. Just listening to my son talk with his friends stresses me out.

I’m not alone in my anxiety. According to surveys released last summer by language education platform Preply, over half (53%) of Baby Boomers and 30% of Gen Xers are mystified by the slang used by younger generations. And 54% of us are worried that we’re using slang the wrong way and making fools of ourselves.

And lest you think it’s just an “old person” problem, even some Gen Zers are confused by the new slang. Nathan Freihofer, a fitness influencer who’s just 26, posted a video of a song featuring Gen-Alpha slang like “skibidi” and “rizzler,” and admitted he’d “never felt old” until he heard it.

For the first time in my life, I have something in common with a 26-year-old fitness influencer. That alone feels like a victory.

There are plenty of resources out there to help you identify what these new words mean. But that doesn’t always clear up the mystery. A Google search revealed that “skibidi toilet” originated from an animated YouTube series with the same name. But I challenge anybody over the legal drinking age to watch the video and not walk away thinking, Am I having a fever dream right now? 

Which brings me, as it does with many of my fellow Gen X parents and Boomer grandparents, at an impasse. Should I be educating myself in Gen-Alpha slang, or just ignoring it? Should I playfully tease my son about his nonsense lingo? Or heaven forbid, start using it? I want to communicate with my kid, but not if it means becoming the dad incarnation of that Steve Buscemi “How Do You Do, Fellow Kids” meme.

I reached out to some linguists, kinda hoping they’d say, “You’re right, your kid is nuts. His entire generation is ruining language.” But instead, they patiently explained that maybe the reason Gen-Alpha slang makes no sense is because it wasn’t meant for me.

“It’s somebody else’s language,” said Grant Barrett, a lexicographer for several Cambridge dictionaries, and the vice president of the American Dialect Society. “It’s why business jargon often annoys people. We don’t feel included. And that’s a natural human response. But it doesn’t mean that the language itself is bad.”

Jessica Rett, a professor of linguistics at UCLA, explained that it’s part of a larger effort among younger generations to distinguish themselves from the culture of their parents and grandparents.

“They do this in a bunch of different ways: they change the music they listen to; they change the fashion they wear; and linguistically, by changing the language they use,” she said. “This all works to do exactly what they want it to do: it delimits ‘their people’ from other people, and it insulates them from infiltration.”

It works so well that even Rett, 43, sometimes feels confused by it. “If you were to spend time, like I do, grilling 20-year-olds about slang, you still wouldn't get it all, and certainly not all of the nuance,” she told me. 

That nuance comes across not just in the slang they use, but how they say it. Rett describes it as “bidialectical.” In other words, they use different dialects, or registers, to talk to their peers than they use when speaking with parents or grandparents. “So it's unlikely the older generations will be put in a position where they absolutely have to understand slang, and that's fine,” Rett said. “Kids these days already know they need to interpret us differently than they do their peers.”

Of course, we’re not just trying to understand our kids. When slang leaves you in the dark, it’s hard not to wonder, Are they making fun of us? Is ‘skibidi toilet’ some big joke at our expense? The media sometimes feeds that paranoia. Earlier this year, the New York Post published a slang exposé with this terrifying headline:

Adam Aleksic, a Harvard-trained Gen Z linguist who describes himself as the Internet’s first “linguistics influencer,” dismisses stories like this as “click bait” and “alarmist generational rhetoric.” Gen-Alpha—and Gen Z, for that matter—“aren’t using new language to insult you,” he said. “They're using it because it sounds funny and builds their own identity.”

In fact, a surefire way to make sure they do make fun of you is by trying too hard to decode their slang. Remember back in 1992, when the New York Times published a “Lexicon of Grunge,” filled with all the strange slang of (then) young Gen-Xers?

As it turns out, the Times had been tricked by a 25-year-old record label sales rep, who made up every slang term on their list. She assumed they’d realize it was a joke. They wouldn’t seriously think that Gen-Xers were saying things like “swingin’ on the flippity-flop” (hanging out), “bound-and-hagged” (staying home on a weekend), or “lamestain” (an uncool person), would they? But no, they bought it all, hook-line-and-sinker, and published every absurd slang term as fact.

The joke continued. Gen Xers printed up t-shirts with the fake glossary. Members of the band Mudhoney used the fake slang in interviews. It took years before older generations realized they’d been had.

There’s a lesson here, and it comes straight from us. Our slang in the ‘90s wasn’t about making fun of parents and grandparents. But when older generations wanted to know our secrets? When they insisted on more details about what exactly we were really saying? Okay fine, NOW we’re making fun of you!

Speaking of “our” slang, Barrett points out that although the secret language invented by our kids and grandkids sounds like something from another planet, it follows the same basic template of previous generational slang. “It tends to be funny,” he said. “It tends to be in-jokes. It tends to show inclusion in the group. It tends to be about what’s cool and what’s not cool.” 

Just think about the slang of your youth, and what your parents and grandparents must’ve thought. For Boomers, older generations must’ve been mystified when you said things like “I’m going to split” or “you're a square” or “don’t harsh my mellow.” Imagine them staring back at you, slack-jawed, wondering, What’s this damn whippersnapper even talking about?

For my generation, the Xers, my parents couldn’t make heads or tails of us. The first time I told my dad to “take a chill pill, dude,” I thought he was going to kick me out of the house. They never did make sense of slang like “vibing” or “homeslice,” or the difference between “phat” and “fat.”

Rett, in her attempts to explain “skibidi” to me, said something that put it all in perspective. “Its meaning is ineffable, or hard to define,” she explained. “Skibidi is more like ‘wack’ in this respect—its main function is to express heightened emotion, so that emotion can be either positive or negative. If I say ‘That's wack’ to my friend, it could be either super cool or messed up.”

It was a lightbulb moment for me. Of course, skibidi is just the new wack, a nonsense word I used extensively in my youth. It wasn’t meant to make fun of my parents, or alienate them. I loved it because it was slang that belonged to me and my friends alone. If my dad had started a conversation at dinner by saying, “Work was totally wack today,” it would have taken away all of that word’s power, and it's fun. 

Yesterday, when Charlie came home from school and gave me the typical summation of his day—“skibidi toilet”—I didn’t get angry or confused or make fun of him for his ridiculous vocabulary. I just nodded and said, “That sounds wack.”

He stared back at me, astounded. “Um, okay,” he said, barely suppressing a grin. I must’ve sounded as crazy to him as he did to me. So we had something in common.

It’s not much, but it feels like he and I are actually communicating for the first time in awhile.