- my iParenting
- quick clicks
- preteenagers today articles
- preteenagers today q&a
- teenagers today articles
- teenagers today q&a
- community & groups
- research baby names
- prepare a birth plan
- content channels
- ip channel rss feeds
- read birth stories
- read parenting stories
- recommended books
- e-newsletters
- safety recalls
- ip diaries
- ip store
- mom of the month
- dad of the month
- editor's letter
- letters to the editor
From Our Sponsors
- e-newsletters
- Sign up to receive our free weekly e-newsletters
- award-winning products
The iParenting Media Awards program helps parents find the best products for their families.
The Secret to Slang
Do You Know What Your Child Is Really Saying?
By Sue Marquette Poremba
As Kim Hoelzi has learned, in today's language, "pimp" means "cool," not someone who hustles a ring of prostitutes. On the other hand, says McKee, "if parents hear their son talking with his friends about 'hitting it' the other night, then they're going to have to have a serious sit-down talk with him." The term hitting it, according to the Slang Dictionary, means having sex.
While most slang is harmless – or at the very worst, annoying – parents do need to be aware of ethnic, sex and drug slang. These are the words that kids use as code to hide behavior from their parents. For example, a couple of middle-school-aged boys were talking about rainbows. The parents who overheard the conversation thought it was a little odd, boys talking about rainbows, but they otherwise ignored the conversation. Later, the parents discovered the boys were actually talking about receiving oral sex from a number of girls who wear different colors of lipstick.
Although most sex slang is universal, drug slang tends to be more regional or ethnic. "Drug slang operates more like a special language used to disguise what's going on," says Timothy Jay, a professor of psychology at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts and author of Cursing in America: A Psycholinguistic Study of Dirty Language in the Courts, in the Movies, in the Schoolyards and on the Streets