‘Snacky’ and Its Cousins

By Robin Stern and Zorana Ivcevic Pringle

Salty. Snatched. Slayed. Shook. And snacky?

Whether you’re a teen spearheading the latest slang or a parent trying to keep up with it, you’ve probably come across some of these head-scratching terms on social media.

Gen Z is neither the first nor last generation to whip up a linguistic cookbook all their own. They have reinvented familiar lexicon to reflect the world as they see it, using words like “cringe,” “mid,” and “sus” to express a certain disillusionment with the status quo. As the first cohort to grow up in a world saturated with newsfeeds and online culture, they are now entering professional spaces, amending work vocabulary for modern times, and forcing us all to confront how we communicate across generational jargon. If someone is acting “shady” (untrustworthy) or “flakey” (unreliable), they’re the first to name it.

But at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, all this new vocabulary has us wondering something else: What happens when words that were never meant to be used as feelings suddenly are?

Like “snacky.” As co-creators of the How We Feel app, a handheld journal for tracking your daily emotions, we received unexpected requests from users about emotions they wished appeared in the app. For example, with nearly 150 feeling words to choose from (e.g., eager, disappointed, joyful), some app users still wanted to see more slang-like terms, such as “snacky."

Of course, there is nothing inherently wrong with using slang to communicate how you’re feeling. We don’t want to take away niche vocabulary that younger generations have creatively made their own. But like the proliferation of therapy-speak in which words such as “depressed” and “traumatized” are misused and miscommunicated, slang sends mixed signals when definitions differ.

What if your “cringe” feeling doesn’t look like mine?

What if my definition of “lit” doesn’t match yours?

What if I say I feel “snacky” and you take it literally? (Who could blame you?)

Our conversation may be in vogue, but we’re not speaking the same language. We may be making bids for connection—literally trying to build connection, as coined by relationship experts at the Gottman Institute—but on an unequal playing field. Slang can allow people—especially youth—to bond within an in-group while reinforcing boundaries with the out-group (e.g., “OK, boomer”). In other words, building rapport with some can come at the expense of miscommunicating and excluding others.

While examples like “lit” and “cringe” seem simplistic, the consequences can also become significant in high-stakes circumstances, such as at work or in the midst of heated arguments, when emotional lingo contributes to more smoke and mirrors than vulnerability and clear conversation.

In our work teaching people how to recognize, understand, label, express and regulate their own and others’ feelings to live emotionally intelligent lives, we have seen how a lack of shared emotional vocabulary leads to misunderstanding at best, or disconnection and interpersonal conflict at worst.

Indeed, slang can provide a helpful shorthand for communicating vulnerable feelings through modish means to people who share a similar background. But it’s not always helpful. When such words are tossed around across generational or other social groups, we lose the opportunity to accurately recognize and label our emotions towards a shared, accessible emotional vocabulary that all can partake in.

Zorana Ivcevic Pringle, Ph.D., is a senior research scientist at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, and the author of the upcoming “The Creativity Choice.”