No Cap: Slang Is Low-key More Powerful Than Ever

For teens, it’s a means of bonding. For parents, it’s a font of frustration. For algorithms, it’s a path to engagement. And for online influencers, it’s a stream of income. Whatever role slang plays in our lives, we can’t avoid it, and while it may seem more ubiquitous now than ever, it’s been with us throughout our history as one of the core ways that we tell the world who we are.

“Language is a tool of identity, always,” says Adam Aleksic, the internet’s @EtymologyNerd and the author of Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language. “The words you use say something about you.”

Status among adolescents, for example, is not determined entirely by social class. Wealthy kids may have more expensive clothes and cars, but you can be as cool, if not cooler, without those things: “When you’re hip and edgy and oppositional or ‘street,’ we call that ‘covert prestige,’ and it is incredibly strong,” explains Valerie Fridland, a professor of linguistics at the University of Nevada, Reno, and the author of Why We Talk Funny: The Real Story Behind Our Accents. For adolescents, slang can be a big part of that, but while “cool kids” may be the major spreaders of new terms, they’re not typically the originators.

Stanford sociolinguist Penny Eckert’s 1980s research into adolescent vocal patterns found that so-called “burnout” kids—outsiders who generally reject markers of conformity and the accommodation of adults in charge of schools—more rapidly adopted innovative vowel pronunciations. As those speech patterns became seen as anti-establishment or cool, the more popular kids in local ecosystems started picking them up. “We see this cycle with a lot of language change,” says research linguist Daniel Hieber, creator of the Linguistic Discovery social media channels. “It starts in niche, marginalized, or minority groups, and then gets adopted by more mainstream groups.”

One of the clearest examples of this route is the influence of African-American vernacular English, which is arguably the source of a majority of what we call Gen Z, Gen Alpha, or TikTok slang, including terms like rizz, slay, let them cook, shade, flex, and no cap. Once such words break out of their original circles and start being used by the cool kids, they trickle down to everyone else. And yet, as that process plays out, Hieber says, there’s less and less awareness of the original source. “That’s why you have so much discussion about cultural appropriation.”

No matter the source, once a slang term breaks through, it tends to take on a life of its own. “Ideas spread through cascades of networks, and our nodes are more connected than ever before,” Aleksic says. “The virus goes viral. It infects all the hosts—and then we start feeling that maybe the word is overused.”

Why We Use Slang

A slang term takes root in our consciousness and speech patterns when we impute it with social prestige, and Aleksic believes there are only two reasons we do that: We find it funny or we find it cool. Slang that originates in African-American circles goes viral, he says, because it’s associated with speakers perceived as cooler: “By using the word you make yourself part of that in-group. You are saying something about yourself.”

What’s cool, almost definitionally, is also subversive. Slang “is not in the dictionary, and it’s not endorsed by some authority,” Aleksic says. “It’s cool because it’s defying the traditional norms of what language is.” And if it makes your friends laugh, all the better.

So if a slang term catches on and reaches nearly everyone’s awareness, why do we feel a need to replace it so quickly? In part, it’s because once parents and other “squares” start using it, it loses its cool factor, but just as crucially, Hieber explains, two other factors motivate people to constantly try coining new ways of saying the same thing: The first is the social pressure to be novel. If you’re in a niche culture whose terminology gets widely adopted, you want to continue to differentiate yourself and identify yourself as part of a group that’s distinctive. This is why people who used to be “squares” are now “bots,” why what was once “the bomb” is now “gas,” and why things that were “lame” are now “mid.”

The second pressure is human nature: We cognitively adjust to stimuli very quickly, language included. When a trending word begins to lose its ability to surprise us or make us laugh, it’s no longer as interesting—and it needs to be replaced.

The Engagement Treadmill

One other factor has a profound effect, both directly and indirectly, on the virality of slang today: the reach of social media.

Content moderation programs trained to censor discussions of sex, drugs, or other topics reject, or strictly limit the promotion of, posts with those terms, which has over the years led to the propagation of a universe of linguistic work-arounds, many of which have become popular slang terms on their own: seggs for sex, for example. Some of these terms are not just phonetic clones—unalive as a way to refer to suicide, for example, or acoustic to describe being on the autism spectrum. “Human language is tenacious, and we always find ways to express ourselves even within the constraints of a medium,” Aleksic says.

We like to believe that our slang spreads organically, and that’s often the case, but algorithms now put a very heavy thumb on the scale. Social-media influencers, and wannabe influencers, need their content to be pushed by platforms’ algorithms to as many other feeds as possible. To achieve that, many monitor trending terms and then insert those words into their own captions and posts. They may not personally be enamored of six-seven or rizz, but if dropping those words into a post is what it takes to gain more views, they will do it. In this way, Aleksic says, “algorithms are a productive force. They categorize trends and then push them online. It’s how they grab attention and commodify your viewership. And when they incentivize a trend, influencers feel as if they have to hop on.”

One by-product of this engagement treadmill may be less originality online. Aleksic points to 2023 research from Oxford finding that influencers indeed purposefully minimize their own creativity “to pander to algorithmic tastes and … enhance their visibility.”

In his 1962 book, Diffusion of Innovations, sociologist Ernest Rogers described how information trended across groups of people—first innovators, then early adopters, followed by the largest groups, which he called the early majority and the late majority, and finally the laggards. Linguists believe this model applies to slang as well, and that, by putting trending words in a firehose, social media is compressing this timeline. Still, parents and other nonadolescents remain firmly stuck on the right side of the graph. “I get asked all the time, ‘Why are people suddenly saying skibidi or no cap?’” Hieber says, “and almost without exception, when you look at the history of a term, it’s been around for a while, and they’re just noticing it because it’s on that spike where it’s getting popular so quickly that there’s exponential growth in use.”

Gibberish and Innovation

There are a few primary types of slang words—for example, those that Fridland calls “meaningfully meaningless” like skibidi or six-seven, and those that repurpose or refine existing words in some way, like sus or lowkey.

Six-seven is essentially gibberish, but it didn’t come out of nowhere. Philadelphia rapper Skrilla may or may not have coined it, but its use in his track, “Doot Doot (6 7),” a song about street life that had its unofficial release in December 2024, led to its spread, especially when it became popular as the background music for edits of NBA and college basketball plays on TikTok, including some featuring Charlotte Hornets star LaMelo Ball, who happens to proudly stand…6-foot-7. From there, it was off to the engagement treadmill: “Other NBA players realized that they could get clipped into these music videos if they said the word six-seven on camera. And then Gen Alpha kids start saying six-seven on camera, and then they start saying it off camera,” Aleksic says. For him, the term represents “an absurd realization of how social media pushes certain types of language.”

As for Skrilla, he told the Wall Street Journal, “I never put an actual meaning on it, and I still would not want to. That’s why everybody keeps saying it.”

Rizz, on the other hand, is a classic example of repurposing. Charisma is a word that’s been around a long time to describe a trait that attracts us to people. But the idea of rizz, as used most prominently by Twitch streamer Kai Cenat, captured the notion that there’s something hard to pin down about what makes certain people seem so confident and attractive, even if they’re not conventionally good looking or “cool.” (The slang term aura describes a similar phenomenon.)

A third category includes existing words taken on a grammatical shift through their use as slang. Consider lowkey. It’s a term we already used as an adjective, but now, as a slang adverb and emphasizer, it has gained wider meaning—and might just keep it. “It’s not just, ‘The lighting is lowkey,’ but ‘Oh, that’s lowkey interesting,’” Aleksic says. “Some small quality gets changed but it’s intuitive. That makes the word spread.”

Critics of slang often underestimate its ability to introduce, and adhere to, new grammatical rules. For example, using “like” as a substitute for said—known as the “quotative like”—has been going on for quite some time, but it’s not as casual as it may seem. The quotative like represents a new grammatical construction, used for nonverbatim reporting of what people say, Hieber explains. “We now have a very handy, very useful distinction between verbatim and nonverbatim quotes; you’ve got said versus like.” For example, to report, “And I was like, there’s no way I’m going to that party,” doesn’t suggest you actually told someone that, but your reporting still successfully conveys how you felt when you politely declined an invitation.

Why Kids Use Slang Most

Slang has always had its origins in the mouths and minds of young people, for whom the fact that parents can’t make sense of phrases like sus, chopped, or no cap is, developmentally, very much the point. “When you’re a child, you are in the process of language acquisition and identity formation. When you’re an adult, these things have already happened,” Fridland says. It’s not just that kids use different words from their parents; they are more sensitive to, and more flexible in adopting, new word forms and pronunciations. “Adults are past the language formation period. It simply isn’t as possible for them to pick up innovative variants.”

That shift in young people’s speech during adolescence, when they move from the model of their parents to the model of their peer group, is known as vernacular reorganization. “There’s an incredible amount of evidence that parents play a much weaker role in dialect formation than peer groups do,” Fridland says. It’s why, when a family moves to a new country, the children learn to speak with a local accent, but the parents generally cannot.

There’s also real social value for adolescents in being able to impress peers through the use of slang. “Intense social identity formation pressure encourages the development of innovative linguistic forms,” Fridland says. “It’s attractive in a way that’s universal to other adolescents.”

Who Coins Our Words?

Before slang reaches the cool kids in the playground, or top online influencers, someone has to conceive of it and share it with their own in-group. Initially, it may have meaning only within that group. “In a group with a shared interest, there is often a need to invent new slang because you didn’t have the language to express this thing that you wanted to talk about,” Aleksic says.

In African-American nightclubs, among Taylor Swift fan groups, on message boards for the neurodivergent, and in countless other social circles, a galaxy of original slang words are being used right now, and outsiders are eavesdropping. When they encounter a word they can identify with, it may spread. “That’s a key determinant,” Fridland says. “Does the word capture, ‘Oh my God, they get me’? When a lot of people have an aspect of meaning in their experience, and then all of a sudden someone gives them a word for it, that becomes really easy to spread.”

Social media enables such eavesdropping. As we curate our feeds, the content we are capable of following expands from our own community to any community. “It breaks down some of the barriers that were up between different subcultures when we were in school face-to-face,” Fridland says. “I’m not a gamer, but I can pick up gaming slang.”

One place where a subset of current slang originated has caused some concern among parents. Young men known as “incels,” or involuntary celibates, are highly active on anonymous online platforms like 4chan, where their message boards feature content that is often highly misogynist and sometimes violent. Yet they have also spawned a number of widely-adopted slang terms.

How worried should adults be when they hear kids saying Chad, beta, sigma, pilled, or mogging? “The incel philosophy is organized by a sociosexual hierarchy, and their language reinforces this: It classifies people and makes it easier to normalize that type of idea,” Aleksic says. Still, for most middle-schoolers, “it’s just a funny thing to connect over.”

“For a lot of kids, it’s just adventure with language and for very few do I think this can be harmful,” Fridland says. “The trick is to know thy child.”

Linguistic research has shown that when terms leak out of echo chambers, their original meaning is often lost, but not always. “Incels created language with a genuine context,” Aleksic says. “It takes on a humorous context for others, but then maybe it travels far enough that someone else reinterprets it with its genuine context again.”

What’s Been Lost

Traditionally, linguists researching dialects focused on specific geographic regions and the particular terms and intonations its residents used. That’s changed. “When we look at Gen Z and younger, we find that they’re actually losing regional accent features, and it’s probably very much because part of their peer group is not local; it’s the world of the internet,” Fridland says.

What once kept us speaking like the people with whom we grew up was our desire to identify with them and feel like a part of their pack. “But when your pack is huge, and maybe they live in France, you don’t necessarily need that kind of local dialect,” Fridland says. “What we find is not so much that people are speaking more like other people on the internet, but they’re speaking less like people in their hometowns. They’re moving away from regional dialects more than they’re moving toward some specific other one, because the internet’s too diverse a place for there to be a single dialect.” As for their lexicon, it’s less local as well: “All the kids know the same influencers, even if they don’t necessarily like them. That homogenizes what they pick up.”

Innovation or Brain Rot?

In every generation, elders worry that young people’s use of slang will rot their brains—brain rot was actually the Oxford 2024 Word of the Year—but in every generation, it doesn’t happen. There are reasons to be concerned about kids—declining attention spans, declining literacy rates—but linguists don’t link those issues to the fact that some of them say skibidi once in a while. “They’re saying it as an act of identity,” Aleksic says. “It’s just a funny thing to bond over with their fellow kids.

“We’ve always had slang, and that has not affected our ability to have reasonable thoughts and be rational.”

While certain adults seek to thwart slang—some school administrators have tried, unsuccessfully, to ban six-seven from their buildings—others are tempted to try to be hip and talk to youngsters at their own level by using more slang themselves. They may want to resist that urge: “You have to respect that kids are using this slang precisely because they are trying to distinguish themselves from you,” Hieber says. “When you try to adopt that slang with them, it’s stepping on their identity creation process. And they can see this.”

There’s also little reason to fear that teens will spiral away from parents in a word cloud of gobbledygook. “If language changed too fast, we wouldn’t be able to understand it,” Hieber says. Even though adolescents are the primary drivers of slang, “We have to have intergenerational communication in order for language to even work.”

Allowing distaste for slang to distance adults from teens is counterproductive. “So much of what people have to say about slang is: It’s stupid. It doesn’t make sense,” Hieber says. “But it’s helpful to realize, first, we did this too as kids, and some of that stuff is now considered grammatically standard and acceptable, and some of the newer slang will stick around and become permanent parts of the language too. It is actually pretty incredible what we’re doing when we change language like this, so the linguistic creativity deserves a little appreciation.”

As for worries that kids will drop no cap or mid during a job interview or use them in their college papers, Hieber says, the research strongly suggests it just doesn’t happen. “After adolescence, kids switch back.”

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sus

adj., worthy of suspicion or skepticism
Sus, a shortened version of suspicious, was the number-one slang term used by teens in 2023, according to some surveys, but it and some other internet-driven slang took on a new role in the fall of 2025, when political protests driven by young people—many called them “the Gen Z protests”—unexpectedly led to the overthrow of the government of Nepal, with at least 76 people dying in the process. A key flashpoint for the protests was the government’s ban on internet platforms, including YouTube, Facebook and WhatsApp, spurring some protesters to carry signs bearing slogans like, “Corruption is sus, stop ghosting democracy.”

acoustic

adj., autistic
Acoustic’s online trajectory is an example of “context collapse.” In his book, Algospeak, Adam Aleksic describes how the term began as an in-joke among people in online autistic communities but then escaped that bubble and became a meme that gained traction on TikTok, where it was more likely to refer to that community pejoratively but could not be policed.

sigma

n., a humble alpha male; adj., the best
Sigma, which began as a letter in the Greek alphabet and has also been used in mathematics and business, recently leaped into the mainstream from incel message boards. In incel culture, a sigma is a confident, attractive man—like an alpha male, but more chill about it. On the internet, it has also been used as an adjective meaning “the best,” or just as a meaningless meme.

giving

v., putting out a vibe
Giving is one of a number of current slang terms—in this case, what’s known as a phrasal template—with origins in ballroom culture of the 1980s and 90s, a largely underground scene of Black and Latino LGBT dance and drag parties and competitions. Giving suggests someone’s attitude or look is putting out a specific feeling, and can be used as a compliment or an insult. “That outfit is giving Emily in Paris,” for example, or, “His hair is giving Groot.”

cap/no cap

n., lie/no lie
Not all popular slang is newly coined. Cap/no cap has its origins in African American vernacular of the early 20th century, but has recently broken into the mainstream to call out falsehoods (“She likes you? Cap.”) or to pledge sincerity (“I’ll pay you tomorrow, no cap.”)

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AI and Slang: Are the Bots...Bots?

Large language model programmers are working to help their systems keep up with slang, especially as research is beginning to show that chatbots can gain more traction with young people if they are able to successfully use trending terms in their responses. But it hasn’t been easy. “Large language models struggle with Gen Alpha slang,” linguist Daniel Hieber says, “precisely because it is designed to be nonmainstream outsider language. It’s recent and it’s novel, and programmers haven’t had time to incorporate it yet.”

One result is that models designed to detect bullying, trolling, and harassment online are failing because the abuse is so slang-coded. “We can’t train our tools to even know what it means,” Hieber says.

On another front, while some worry that generative AI may put millions out of work, slang creators are probably safe. “We adopt words when we feel social prestige from them, and you’re not going to feel social prestige if they come from AI,” linguist Adam Aleksic says. “It has to be an effervescent human phenomenon. You might come up with your own language with AI, but that’s not going to spread to the mainstream. It’s got to be something that works on a collective level.”

“The whole point of slang is to form an identity that you see in the world and want to be like,” linguistics professor Valerie Fridland says, “and I don’t think many of us want to be a chatbot.”

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