You can read a book or listen to someone read something from the 1800s and there will be words you're not familiar with, but there's enough context that you can infer the meaning.
Scrolling through black people twitter (also gen z'ers because their slang is ebonic ghetto speak), it's constant speaking in what amounts to code.
Inference doesn't help, context doesn't help.
Heck, even looking it up doesn't really help half the time.
I've looked up the definition of "based" many times and still couldn't give you a good definition of it, which is why it's this catch all term that leftists use too. Because it doesn't mean anything.
There's always been slang in every generation that older people go "huh"
But basically an 80s teen could communicate with a an old person no problem even if the old person doesn't know what radical or tubular means.
With ebonics, it's much closer to a foreign language than mere slang.
I feel like if I encountered the term radical if twitter was around in the 80s, it would take me all of 30 seconds to infer the meaning....oh they say this whenever they see something really impressive....ok radical = impressive
But you go through black twitter and the worst inclined aspects of Gen z twitter and context and inference will not help you.
Again that's more the experience of stumbling upon Japanese twitter. You can stare at those Japanese letters all day long and you won't be able to pick up the meaning.
So yeah, when people call themselves black, and rarely ever identify as American, or have essentially a foreign identity, and speak a foreign language essentially, they're kind of like foreigners.
I'm 33, that's not the age where there's a giant gap in how people talk, not this type of gap, where there's a nearly foreign difference.
A 33 year old in the 80s would not be confused by the teens using rad and tubular and whatnot. Just like "Fa shizzle my nizzle" wasn't particularly confusing, even though it was retarded.
An 80 year old in the 80s would be confused by rad and tubular.
That sort of language degredation between people just over 10 years apart is not expected.
The reason is because the ebonics crap has been utterly confusing for decades. If you ever encountered even in mid to early 2000s, black people hanging out, it was so difficult to understand half of what they were talking about. Ebonics has been a seperately sort of developed thing all along. I was a teenager in camp and when the black guys were speaking the Ebonics, I couldn't understand anything. Was I "too old" as a teenager?
The reason Gen Z is non-understandable is because their slang is rooted in an entirely different culture than young people in the 80s were rooted in.
80s young people, were still iterating on the same white culture slang since like the 40s and 50s. Cool Cat, hip, square...things like that in the 50s became the rad, tubular, and bogus...thus the common throughline.
The more that slang among white culture has adopted ebonics, starting with the late 90s/early 2000s today, the harder it is to make an inference about what it means.
Someone who was young in the 50s and used "hip" would instinctively understand the term rad when they were 50 in the 80s even if they didn't personally use the word.
Ebonics is a totally different starting point, and Gen Z has embraced ebonics slang wholesale.
That's why it sounds foreign to a 33 year old, because it sounded foreign to teenage me as well.
I'm 34 and have long agreed with your statements here on wiggerisms & [younger elements of..] gen z as a whole. It's pidgin speak that has become mainstream and goes beyond mere slang. My hunch is that it's the deliberate dumbing down of society; a permanent caste of barely literate, hardly sentient pidgin speakers that can't organize or express themselves beyond "muh dih,cuh" and other guttural expresions.