Boychiks in the Mall
By Lisa Traiger
The Zandl Group, a market research firm, tracks what's hot and cool among young people ages 9 to 17. Here are a few findings from a recent Zandl study: 16 is the coolest age and "raw" and "ill" both mean cool; "shady" is sketchy and "boo ya" means "whatever". Remember that the next time a carload of refrigerator-marauding teens invades your kitchen. At the very bottom of the 23-word list on Zandl's latest "hot sheet," a concise dictionary of teenspeak for age-challenged baby boomers and their parents, is "kosher." Most of us Jews know from kosher; it means proper, fitting, and it's also what many of us choose to eat.
For teens, those pierced and tattooed offspring that periodically return home when their stomachs and wallets empty, it also means proper. Maybe they say things like: "Hey, girlfriend, the way those dogs played some chillin' hoops was kosher." Translation, using the handy Zandle hotsheet: "Hey, those men played some relaxing basketball properly." Sure, it's tough to fathom other Jewish or Yiddish terms getting picked up by the ever-shifting youth culture, but think of the possibilities. Modern American mall-dwelling teens may have started with that simple, direct adjective, kosher, but it shouldn't be long before "vos 'iz" or "nu?" replaces "what's up" or "'s'up" on urban playgrounds. Instead of a "phat" 15-year-old girl, decked out in skin-tight retro '60s garb and platform tennis shoes, will she become a "shayna maidl"? When one teen describes his latest date to a friend, will the friend interject with "Hok mir nit kayn chainik"("don't knock me a teapot") rather than the more concise and current slang: "blah, blah, blah"? And enough of claiming that clothes, CDs, movies and games are "fresh." Instead, the exclamation "gevalt!" should suffice. Maybe relaxing will be called "shluffing" instead of "chillin'"? Perhaps when the next generation (is that Generation Z?) likes something, they won't exclaim, "I'm all over that!" They'll just "kvell."
Think of how this new development in teen talk could link the generations. Grandparents, white-haired Jews who bridged two worlds when they came from the Old Country to the Goldineh Medina, and their grandchildren could speak to each other on equal footing. It's only we in-between boomers who have missed the boat. My advice: Go hang out at the local multiplex with a copy of Leo Rostenšs The Joys of Yiddish. "Peace out." "Aleichem Shalom."
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