“Glazed” has a similarly impressive precision. When my son describes something as glazed, it’s meant to signify not lying, exactly, or even exaggerating, but the act of positively spinning a judgment. “Glazed” indicates a gilding of information; sports commentary, for example, is 90 percent glaze. When Stephen A. Smith, the quintessential glazer, likens Anthony Edwards to Michael Jordan, a proper response might be “The Ant glazing is crazy.” But glaze is also the perfect description of the way social media works: The world you encounter online is perpetually glazed, with everything taking on an artificially positive, unreal and not entirely trustworthy gloss.
There are other revealing terms I’ve learned from my son: “Sus,” short for “suspicious” or “suspect,” suggests a world that’s dubious enough that you need a diminutive to describe it. “Cringe” is the perfect catchall for that jarring brand of performative sincerity that’s so common online. Young people need diminutives to describe these realities; they’ve become so commonplace.
But my favorite new slang word is “based” — short for “based in fact” or “based in reality” and often used as a term of assent when someone states a controversial opinion. “Canada should join the United States,” one might say, to which someone else might reply, “Based.” It’s typically used for political subjects but it can have a wider social utility: “Luka Doncic should be the M.V.P. of the N.B.A.” “Based.”
“Based” can have a more malevolent connotation in certain alt-right circles, where being based alludes to allegiance to a contrarian viewpoint. But to my ear, “based” is a perfect word, a necessary word, to describe the informational chaos we inhabit. The fact that being based in reality now qualifies as a compliment is evidence that kids like my son have come of age in a climate in which misinformation, hype and fraud are so endemic that exceptions are notable. For them, to encounter something based in reality is rare enough to deserve its own distinct shorthand.
Young people, as they have from the beginning of time, are figuring out exclusive terms to describe their world. As always, it’s a world that the olds cannot comprehend or co-opt. The world of my son’s generation is a dark one — full of corporate triumph and the defeat of public spirit, where systems of meaning are decaying and a lack of clarity is spreading.
The kids themselves are the only bright spot, which is why I’m so grateful my son offered me a glimpse into the language of his generation. Another purpose of slang is to demonstrate generational distinction, yet slang has brought my son and me closer. It’s taught me that the current crop of teenagers created a language to describe the flawed reality we’ve abandoned them to, and in doing so they’ve proved themselves less deluded and more innovative than we were.