Parlez Vous Teen?

I live with teenagers. Which means I speak a second language.

The other morning at breakfast, the 15-year old mentioned sorrowfully he may have “tossed a fork.” Because I have grown so accustomed to feeling clueless for what my kids and their friends are talking about (“Dude, that song is way sicker with that stupid hotness yo!”), I assumed “tossed a fork” was new lingo for “blew chunks.”
 
Turns out my son had literally thrown a piece of cutlery in the trash on accident.

Clearly I over-analyze, but every day new slang from their ever-evolving vocabularies crops up.
 
Say you hear this from your adolescent after a concert: “Brah, as soon as the show started, it was total awesomation.” Allow me to decode for you: “awesomation” is the point at which something becomes awesome.

Or how about the disturbing, “That dude is ballin!”? “Ballin” has been thrown around our house enough that I am a virtual ballin connoisseur. It means to be living the high life, to be well respected, to be wealthy, or to be a basketball player.
 
A word of caution here: Just because you think you know the meaning of a particular term doesn’t mean you do. Take “Emo”: sometimes it’s capitalized, sometimes it’s not, and it can mean anything from softcore punk music for melodramatic 17 year-olds to an overly emotional individual. (My personal favorite definition from urbandictionary.com? “An excuse for guys to wear tight pants.” Oooh la la!)
 
But emo is the least of your worries. If you have moshing teens in the house, as I do, you will inevitably hear “throwdown”. This one means a million different things to different kids depending on the context. It can mean to throw money (Colton: “Dude, I’m gonna make a McDonald’s run, want some?” Jake: “Sure, dude, I’ll throw down!”); to mosh (“He totally threw down in the pit.”); to throw a party; to throw dawn the gauntlet; to win a fight ( “Who knew that dude would have that kinda throwdown in him?”); to drinking excessively; or to perform brilliantly (“He was epic! He threw DOWN!”). So if you intercept a text on your daughter’s Blackberry that mentions throwing down, I hope for your sanity it’s in reference to acing that Trig test.
 
Speaking of texting, I recently learned two terms with which Generation TMI (too much information) are well acquainted. “Text anxiety” is the worry that occurs after you text someone and they don’t text right back. Are they alive? Mad? What could possibly be taking so long? Then there’s “texting away your dignity”, which is pretty much the texting equivalent of drunk dialing.
 
One of my favorite new slang terms for 2010 is the brilliant “Tiger’s wife mad” — yeah, so angry you find the item the source of your anger cherishes most and proceed to beat him/her with it (“Did you see that dude ask for the manager at Taco Bell? He was Tiger’s wife mad with the burrito!”).
 
This should go without saying, but just in case you’re tempted….do not, under any circumstances, try out these expressions with your kids! Trust. They could easily become TWmad and reach for your…whatev. Use this information solely to decode and delude yourself into feeling cool.

’Cause if you parent a teen, you already know a delusion is as close as you’ll ever get.