Decoding Teen Slang Parodies

About

Decoding Teen Slang Parodies refers to jokes made in parody of articles intended to help parents understand lingo their children are using. Often these are presented as fake acronyms for common texting shorthand, such as saying common acronyms like "brb" and "lol" stand for words related to a certain topic instead of "be right back" and "laughing out loud."

Origin

Articles and concerns about teen slang rose around the same time as popular messaging services such as AIM and MSN grew popular. Some early posts and articles about teen slang appeared in the summer of 2005. On June 10th, 2005, a user posted an inquiry to MAC Forums^[1] inquiring about the sexual connotations about the acronym "gpa." Another early post on SafeSurfingKids^[2] offered a comprehensive list of acronyms.

Spread

Memes parodying articles such as these began appearing with some regularity in the mid 2010s. Memes and photoshops featuring lists of "teen texting codes" were commonly found online around this time. For example, on January 24th, 2015, Redditor iskiran posted a version in the /r/Funny called "Cracking the 'Teen Texting Code.'" The post (shown below) received more than 17,000 points (84% upvoted) and 1,100 comments in three years.

Other popular instances include a post to /r/me_irl from December 28th, 2016 gained over 2,700 points (shown below, left). A post to /r/MemeEconomy from May 28th, 2017 gained over 1,100 points (shown below, right).

Is Your Child Texting About

Is Your Child Texting About is a phrasal template meant to parody alarmist news reports regarding secret text-messaging codes that teenagers use. In this case, the code language is focused on a particular subculture, which in the context of the meme appears innocent. On June 21st, 2017, a Facebook account published a variation that featured the headline "Is Your Child Texting About Communism?" The post (shown below, left) received more than 4,400 reactions, 14,000 shares and 3,900 comments in eight months. Less than one week later, on June 27th, a variation appeared on the 4chan /tv/ messageboard. That day, an anonymous user posted a photoshopped version (shown below, center) that reads "Is Your Child Texting About Twin Peaks?" On September 6th, 2017, Boing Boing published a version (shown below, right) that featured a list for "Is Your Child Texting About Anarcho-Communism?"

Following the popularity on Twitter, several media outlets including The Daily Dot and Mashable published articles on the meme. Twitter published a Moments page to catalog some of the more popular variations.

USA Today Article

On August 10th, 2018, USA Today^[3] published an article explaining modern teen lingo. The article began being joked about on Twitter after user @KrangTNelson posted a screenshot of the list (shown below).

This led others to joke about how USA Today effectively "killed" all the slang terms in the list (examples shown below).

Search Interest

External References