Recently, my wife and I spent eleven days with our three oldest grandkids (Ages: 9, 13, 16). A few months ago, we had done the same “residency” with our two youngest grandkids. One of them had just turned four, and the other was a few weeks away from his second birthday. One of the similarities between the older three and the younger two was that they all said words we couldn’t understand.
At least for the two pre-schoolers, it was because their pronunciation skills hadn’t developed yet, as well as the amount of words that were a part of their vocabulary. With enough effort and patience (and finger-pointing), Carol and I usually were able to figure out what they were saying.
Not so much with the older three, especially the two teenagers. They kept throwing their new words and phrases at us that we weren’t hip enough to understand. (“Hip enough”, that’s an expression from my cool days!) Instead of Latin, I called it “La-teen”, a new dialect that has an invisible age-restrictive fence around it peppered with signs that say, “KEEP OUT, OLD PEOPLE!”
My granddaughter kept saying, “Sigma”, and she’d ask me, “Granddad, are you the sigma?” I was familiar with the Sigma Chi fraternity back in college at Miami of Ohio University. They were an exclusive fraternity known for their snootiness and preppy-looking dress attire. Other than that and the academic distinction of “Sigma Cum Laude”, I was unfamiliar with other definitions of the word.
According to Google, “sigma” means “best”, but the way my granddaughter was using it told me that Google hadn’t caught up to the new emerging uses for it. Just when I thought I had a handle on it, a new wart appeared that brought me back to my frequently-visited satte of confusion.
As our time progressed with the three, other words kept being thrown at me, like verbal snowballs at a defenseless child (with grey hair). I became “the op”. Did I ever “rizz” when I was growing up? Did I have a “bestie?” “What did you think of that song, Granddad? Was that a “bop?”
And then when I’d tell them it was time to get off their technology devices and come back to the real world, I’d get something like, “Why do asking me that, bruh?”
A video was “dead”, which meant the opposite…or should I say “the op?”
“La-teen” is not as difficult as learning Hebrew, which I attempted back in my seminary days, although Henry David Thoreau once said, “It’s too late to be studying Hebrew; it’s more important to understand…the slang of today.”
Jesus had a knack for speaking the language of the day to the people He taught and conversed with. In an agricultural society, He frequently used visuals such as seeds, plows, and sheep to communicate spiritual truth. He connected with a largely illiterate population with pictures that spoke to them. I guess my granddaughter might say, “He was the sigma sigma, even though He was the Op of what most people expected.”
Okay, she wouldn’t say it like that. She’d probably insert a few more “La-Teen” terms in there to confuse me further. It would be her sigma paraphrase of the Word of God.
However, it does make me wonder how she now refers to Jesus’s “Great Commission.” Is there another way of saying, as Jesus did, “Go and make disciples…”
Words from WW Blog 