BY AZU SISHIEKWENE
I was watching the evening news on Monday night when two presenters used a word at different times that jolted me. I’ve heard and seen that word used often, especially by millennials and Gen Z, but I didn’t entirely pay heed because they were mostly in informal settings.
Anyways – I meant to write, anyway – I was jolted to hear that word, anyways, twice from two TV presenters on different programmes on the same station just minutes apart! My Use of English teachers would have beaten the straying “s” out of me if I had used that word even in error.
But that was at another time, before young adults invented more new words and other tokens of social expression, including memes and abbreviations, than at any other time in recent lexical history, thanks to technology and the prevalence of social media.
Words Avant-garde
I’m trying to adjust, but I’m not quite there yet. And in this transition to a brave new world of avant-garde lexicography dominated by young adults, it’s improbable that I would have considered, anyways, a jarringly colloquial word, as proper form.
However, Oxford United Press (OUP), the bastion of rectitude, is leading the world in de-sensitising squeamishness in the use of the English language. In other words, sooner than later, I might well find myself loving and even using, anyways, in proper communication.
In a language and literary study in 2023 for the Word of the Year, OUP crowned “rizz” as the winner. The Press said it created a shortlist of eight words “all chosen to reflect the mood, ethos, and preoccupations” of the previous year and “rizz” emerged as the favourite after over 30,000 language lovers worldwide pared down the word soup to four finalists: rizz, Swiftie, prompt, and situationship.
Rizz Up, Darling!
In case you’re interested in a brief history of the etymology of how rizz might soon become mainstream, OUP explained that just as the fridge was from refrigerator and flu was from influenza, rizz (a noun), which can also be used as a verb, as in “to rizz up,” meaning to attract, seduce, or chat up), has its roots the word “charisma.”
I’m unsure which word might win OUP’s crown in 2024, but I have an in-vogue word slate that would be difficult to ignore. Perhaps lovers of language, especially millennials and Gen Z, the generational curators of these species of unusual words, might help crown a winner from my list for 2024 and share that list on any of my social media handles @ azuishiekwene or email azuishiekwene@ gmail.com. Or text Word of the Year to +234 805 210 0356.
The first candidate for me is “steeze.” I was confused the first time I heard it and couldn’t immediately determine its meaning. An English language coach and content creator on Quora, Jasveer Kaur, described “steeze” as “A slang term which is a mix of ‘style’ and ‘ease’, that means ‘looking effortlessly cool, i.e., charisma or grace.” It’s a cousin of rizz, or “composure”, another synonym for steeze from the Gen Z corpus.
The Lit Vs the Ill-lit
And how about “lit?” When I first heard that someone was “lit”, I thought they were alight, literally burning! It turned out that I was hugely mistaken. “Lit”, I later found out, means something different. It’s a slang derived from African American Vernacular English, which gained popularity in the 2000s. It’s been around for quite a while, but somehow, the “ill-lit” like me never quite thought it would soon be making its way to the mainstream.
But thanks to hip-hop and pop culture, it has become a favourite expression among millennials and Gen Z. If you say, “The concert last night was lit,” for example, or “Her performance in the game was lit,” there’s nothing more to add. It’s the highest expression of excitement and enthusiasm. In the same way, my father’s highest compliment was “noble”, as in “You’ve done noble!”
Rizz, lit, and dope, I’m told, are in the same class, with ritz (derived from the ostentation of Ritz, the famous hotel and hospitality brand) being at the higher end of the word spectrum.
Who’s the Simp?
How about “simp”? It’s not exactly a new word. It has evolved, losing five original letters in the process, but gaining new meaning and currency with TikTokers. Back in the day, that word used to be “simpleton”, a man or woman generally thought or believed to be naïve, foolish. Hip-hop culture in the mouth of younger adults gave it a makeover.
They twisted it against men today, and now a simp is often used to describe a man who is overly anxious to please women. This seems to be the opposite of “demure,” a word formerly used to describe modesty in young ladies but now repurposed to convey cuteness in both sexes.
Instead of the ‘50-50 Love’, Teddy Pendergrass crooned about in his famous album, a “simp” is a man who doesn’t mind five percent or less back for his affection and empathy in exchange for 100 percent. He is if you get my drift, a woman wrapper.
If you are already “vibing”, millennial-speak for “losing oneself in great music or conversation”, or feeling “shook”, the colloquial noun or verb for “surprise”, then welcome to the evolving vocab world of young adults fostered by the Internet. From activism to fashion, sports and dating, the language topography is changing, leaving older adults in a trail of incomprehensible slang.
Simply Steeze
In the slang line-up for 2024, anyways, steeze, lit, rizz, vibing, shook, and simp are in the race. But the stage would be incomplete without “ghost” (to suddenly stop communicating with someone, as in ‘he ghosted me after our last meeting’), “no cap”, (the damn truth, no embellishment), as in ‘petrol prices will never return to N470/litre, no cap, or “snack”, (someone attractive, as in ‘she’s looking like a snack in that outfit’).
While these words have a global resonance, one would undoubtedly be at the top of your final list if you were a Nigerian young adult—at home or in the Diaspora: “E choke!” The harsher, more menacing version is “Hunger dey!” However, this latter expression has a broader application and is quite popular among older adults.
When young Nigerian adults say, “E choke,” they express the country’s severe economic hardship. This hardship has left many of them unable to have that sharwama or pizza, fix the braids they’d love to, or even chat for a long without resorting to data mincing.
This ethos was expressed in the streets of many Nigerian states in August, when protesters, mostly angry youths, staged demonstrations captioned #Endbadgovernance, the lightning rod for economic hardship. But the word is used in more than one sense. It also conveys overwhelming pleasure, as in “Give me more, even if it kills me!”
E Choke!
My five finalists for the words that most captured younger adults’ moods, feelings, imagination, and ethos in 2024 are e choke, steeze, no cap, vibing, and composure. I struggled to get the language tool on my laptop to accept these words. I had to overwrite them many times to retain them, as I wondered how examination bodies, like the West African Examination Council (WAEC), would cope with this lexical insurgency.
Is it an indication of the distance these words still have to travel in the transition from fad to mainstream? Or is society just too slow to catch up? No matter, as they say in millennia-speak, las, las, culture, language, and tool developers would be alright.
