The Out-of-Touch Adults' Guide to Kid Culture: The End of Slang

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Youth culture moves fast. New slang is created and abandoned in days, whole communities organize around a blurry photograph, jokes become memes, memes become rituals, and everything might is abandoned before you even notice it exists. It's like to trying to study a snowflake: Once you can look at it, it's already melted. So it is this week, as I take a look a new lexicon of brain-rot slang (that might not really be slang), a meme format based on threatening to eat your Uber driver, and the performative disappointment of youth. Plus, as a reminder that we still still share something, a video about humanity's never-ending fascination with digging holes.

What do "Kevin," "gurt," and "IKIAB" mean?

I cover slang a lot in this column and keep a running glossary of Gen Z and Gen A words, but I'm not sure what to make of "Kevin," "gurt," "IKIAB," and countless other slang terms born in the past couple of weeks. To many young people, anything bad can be described as Kevin, and the word gurt means something like "smart but dangerous" and IKIAB is an acronym for "Imma keep it a buck," which means "I'm telling the truth." But maybe they don't mean anything.

All these new words are part of the quickly evolving world of brain-rot memes, and they straddle a line between self-aware parody of slang and actual slang. IKIAB was coined a few weeks ago by TikTok user @xznthos, who declared it was new slang that everyone would now use. Gurt was invented and defined a few days later, and Kevin a few days after that. This led to making up slang words becoming a meme format in brain-rot videos, with all kinds of people declaring that all kinds of words now mean all kinds of things. But do they? Is slang really slang just because someone says it is and a lot of people see the video?

Taking it a step further, a writer at Daily Dot asked Google Search’s generative AI Overview to define nonsense phrases like “banana slurp” and “cyclops vibing," and it answered that banana slurp "could potentially be a misinterpretation of ‘that’s bananas’ or ‘she/he went bananas,’ which both mean something is crazy, wild, or extremely agitated," and that cyclops vibing "essentially suggests that a person is enjoying themselves and in a good place, even if they are depicted with a somewhat intimidating or unusual image like a cyclops.”

So you don't even need a person to have ever used a word or phrase for it to have a definition (at least to a computer), so when is a word slang and when is it nonsense? That's the kind of question only a total stork smoother would ask.

What is the "I'm so hungry I could eat..." trend?

The "I'm so hungry I could eat..." trend is way easier to understand than brain-rot slang. It's a form of prank video where you secretly record someone's reaction to you saying, "I'm so hungry I could eat X," with X being whatever is likely to get the biggest reaction.

It started with videos of parents saying "I'm so hungry I could eat a kid" to their kids, which is adorable:

Then dog owners started threatening to eat their dogs:

Then things started getting stranger, like this video where someone threatens to eat their Uber driver.

But the height of the trend is saying you're so hungry they could eat a random, specific person from their victim's past. Like an old classmate who might have been dangerous:

or their first boyfriend:

or their coke dealer from the 90s.

What is the Hiccup Cult?

If your child has just joined The Hiccup Cult, don't worry. It's not a cult like The People's Temple; it's just a random TikTok thing with no real meaning. A few weeks ago, TikToker @annesstinkysock posted a video where they pointed out that the character Hiccup from How to Train Your Dragon is kind of funny-looking, and that she'd changed her profile picture to an image of Hiccup. That's it. That's the whole origin story. For some reason no one can explain, this video was spat out to millions of TikTok users, thousands (maybe hundreds of thousands) of whom changed their own profile pictures to Hiccup. Many of them started following each other, and a cult was born. To join, you just have to change your profile picture to Hiccup and you're in.

TikTok cults aren't new. There have been a ton of them revolving around a picture of a hamster, or Dragon Ball character Goku, or minions. It's the kind of thing that will be forgotten quickly, but maybe it provides some sense of belonging for the 12 seconds it exists.

"Rejection cakes" take over the internet

It's the time of year when high school seniors are crossing their fingers and receiving their acceptance or rejection emails from the colleges they applied to. As you'd probably expect, social media is filled with videos of over-achievers crying happy tears because they were accepted at Harvard, Boston College, or all four of the Ivy League schools they applied to. As you'd probably expect, it's getting ridiculous. Just check out how elaborate this video is for getting into UT Austin:

Good for her and all, but I mean, it's UT Austin? Anyway, I'm more interested in the people who won't be choosing between Yale and Dartmouth this fall. The trend for the rest of us, the also-rans and the almost-made-its, this year is rejection cakes. Videos like this one:

and this one:

are providing a much-needed counter-narrative to all the terrible success some people experience. I think there's something more valuable in performative displays of resilience than displays of pride, because we can't all get into Stanford, but we can all eat cake. Anyway, If you'd like to look at young people who have had their hopes dashed early instead of having them dashed when they graduate from their dream college there's a bunch of videos here.

Viral video of the week: A Video About Digging A Hole

A lot of youth culture these days lives up to the "brain-rot" name, but there's always a yin to the yang, like this week's viral video, "A Video About Digging a Hole." This video will not rot anyone's brain. In it, YouTuber Jacob Geller goes deep into the subject of holes. People, particularly younger people, have always been fascinated with holes, and Geller's video examines the cultural and symbolic power of the simple hole in the ground, finding connections between Louis Sachar's classic young adult novel Holes, Minecraft's constant digging and tunneling, 2025's unexpected blockbuster video game A Game About Digging a Hole, and way more hole-based media. This video is worth the watch just for the section on The Kola Superdeep Borehole—the deepest hole humans have ever dug.