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The Secret to Slang
Do You Know What Your Child Is Really Saying?
By Sue Marquette Poremba
(John Benjamins Publishing Co., 1992). "It separates those who know from those who do not know about drugs. Like true slang, the terms become obsolete and have to be replaced by new terms."
Jay also says that just because your kids use sexual slang or drug slang "does not mean they are sexually active drug users. It means that most of their peers use this kind of language and to not be hip to the jargon is to be a nerd, an outsider, a goody goody. Most teens don't want that."
"I don't think slang, in itself, is harmful," says McKee. "Where slang becomes harmful is when it creates even further distance between teenagers and their parents. Parents need to seek to know their kids. The best gift we can give kids is our time. When we seek to get to know our kids' wants, their desires, their likes and dislikes, their music, their language, that shows them that we want to get to know them."
It also helps to have a sense of humor about kids and their use of slang. Kim Hoelzli tells the story of one of her son's friends who said his sister didn't join the swim team because she was "stacked." "Now, I know he meant that she was busy, but I had a picture of her bust being so big when she tried to front crawl, it dragged her down to the bottom of the pool," says Hoelzli. "I suggested [to my son's friend] that he might want to rethink using that one. He told me I had a dirty mind."
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