The Out-of-Touch Adults’ Guide to Children’s Culture: the End of Slang
Youth culture is developing quickly. New slang is created and discarded in a matter of days, entire communities organize around a blurry photo, jokes become memes, memes become rituals, and everything can be abandoned before you even know it exists. It’s like trying to study a snowflake: as soon as you look at it, it has already melted. So this week I’m exploring a new lexicon of brain slang (that may not actually be slang), a meme format based on threatening to eat your Uber driver, and the performative frustrations of youth. Plus, as a reminder that we still have something to share, a video about humanity’s endless fascination with digging holes.
What do “Kevin”, “gurt” and “IKIAB” mean?
I talk a lot about slang in this column and maintain an ongoing glossary of Gen Z and Gen A words , but I’m not sure what to make of “Kevin,” “gurt,” “IKIAB” and the countless other slang terms that have popped up over the last couple of weeks. For many young people, everything bad can be summed up as Kevin, and the word “gurt” means something like “smart but dangerous”, and IKIAB is an acronym for “Imma Keep It a Buck”, which means “I’m telling the truth.” But maybe they don’t mean anything.
All of these new words are part of the booming world of brain rot memes, and straddle the line between self-aware slang parody and actual slang. IKIAB was coined a few weeks ago by TikTok user @xznthos , who stated that it was a new slang that everyone would now use. Edge was invented and defined a few days later, and Kevin a few days later . This has led to coining slang words becoming a meme format in brain-busting videos, with all sorts of people claiming that different words now mean all sorts of different things. But is this true? Is slang really slang just because someone says it and a lot of people watch the video?
Taking it one step further, a writer from the Daily Dot asked Google Search’s Generative AI Review to identify nonsense phrases like “banana bread” and “cyclops vibe,” and he responded that banana slurp “could potentially be a misinterpretation of the phrases ‘it’s bananas’ or ‘she/he’s crazy,’ which both mean something is crazy, wild, or extremely horny,” and that the cyclops vibe “essentially suggests, that people are having fun and in a good place, even if they are depicted in a somewhat frightening or unusual way, like a Cyclops.”
So you don’t even need a person to have ever used a word or phrase for it to have a definition (at least to a computer), so when is a word slang and when is it nonsense? Only the rudest stork would ask such questions.
What is the “I’m so hungry I could eat…” trend?
The “I’m so hungry I could eat…” trend is much easier to understand than brain rot slang. It’s a kind of prank video where you secretly record someone’s reaction to you saying, “I’m so hungry I could eat X,” with X being the one that might get the biggest reaction.
It all started with videos of parents telling their children, “I’m so hungry I could eat the baby,” and it’s adorable:
Then the dog owners started threatening to eat their dogs:
Then things got weirder, like this video of someone threatening to eat an Uber driver.
But the peak of the trend is that you are so hungry that you are ready to eat a random specific person from your victim’s past. Like an old classmate who could be dangerous:
or their first boyfriend:
or their coke dealer from the 90s.
What is the Cult of Hiccup?
If your child has just joined the Cult of Hiccup, don’t worry. This is not a cult like the People’s Temple; it’s just a random thing on TikTok with no real meaning. A few weeks ago, TikToker @annesstinkysock posted a video noting that the Hiccup character from How to Train Your Dragon looked pretty funny and that she had changed her profile photo to a picture of Hiccup. That’s it. That’s the whole origin story. For some reason that no one can explain, this video was sent to millions of TikTok users, thousands (maybe hundreds of thousands) of whom changed their profile pictures to Hiccup. Many of them began to follow each other, and a cult was born. To join, you just need to change your profile photo to “Hiccup” and you’re in.
TikTok cults are not new. There were many of them, revolving around an image of a hamster, the Dragon Ball character Goku , or minions. These are the kind of things that will quickly be forgotten, but perhaps they will provide some sense of belonging for the 12 seconds that they exist.
“Rejection Cakes” Flooded the Internet
It’s that time of year when high school seniors cross their fingers and receive acceptance or rejection emails from the colleges they applied to. As you might expect, social media is filled with videos of high-achieving students crying tears of joy because they were accepted into Harvard , Boston College , or all four Ivy League schools to which they applied. As you might expect, this gets funny. Just check out how detailed this video is to help you get into UT Austin:
Good for her and all, but I mean, is this UT Austin ? In any case, I’m more interested in people who won’t have to choose between Yale and Dartmouth this fall. The trend for the rest of us, the underdogs and the near-successes alike, this year is failover cakes . Video like this:
and this one:
provide a much-needed counter to all the terrible successes that some people experience. I think there’s something more valuable in a performative display of resilience than in a display of pride because we can’t all get into Stanford, but we can all eat cake. Either way, if you want to see young people having their hopes dashed early rather than having their hopes dashed after graduating from their dream college , there are plenty of videos here.
Viral Video of the Week: Video of Digging a Hole
Many youth cultures these days live up to the name “brain rot,” but there’s always a yin to the yang, like this week’s viral video, ” Dig a Hole Video .” This video will not ruin anyone’s brain. In it, YouTuber Jacob Geller delves into the topic of holes. People, especially young people, have always been fascinated by holes, and Geller’s video explores the cultural and symbolic power of a simple hole in the ground, making connections between Louis Sachar’s classic young adult novel Holes , the constant digging and tunneling in Minecraft , the surprise 2025 blockbuster video game The Hole Digging Game, and much more media devoted to holes. This video is worth watching just for the section on the Kola Superdeep Well, the deepest hole humans have ever dug.