Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Getty
The name on everybody’s lips is currently “Gen Z.” Perhaps the most over-defined, over-marketed, and over-exposed generation in human history, everyone wants a piece of us (word to Britney). When social media supplanted TV as the primary form of youth media, it rapidly eroded lines between different media-consuming communities. Now, wherever we go, the rest of the world follows—from our exodus from Facebook to Instagram as tweens, our affair with Snapchat as teens, and our dominance of TikTok as young adults.
But the “we” in question is something that’s tricky to define. Many of the trends and stock phrases attributed to Gen Z are recycled from other cultures’ creations and phenomenons, and AAVE in particular. Gen Z absorbs them all, then replicates them ad nauseam across the web; millennials ape it, and corporations follow in their lead. Thus is the circle of a digitally led life.
The corporations in question include those that drive the entertainment industry, of course. This year has seen many forms of entertainment attempt to be Gen Z’s definitive chronicler (while reaping in the bucks for doing so)—think recent films like Bodies Bodies Bodies and Not Okay, the TV show Heartbreak High, and the newly released Netflix movie Do Revenge. And one of the primary Trojan horses that they all use, in their attempts to ingratiate themselves with the target audience, is language. To talk like Gen Z is to get Gen Z, or so the people throwing money at teen and twenty-something-focused media believe.