I'm in my prime time

If my children hear me say this about primeThey make faces and walk away from me in shame.

-Mom, stop acting so cool.

-Mom, which one cringe When you say these things.

-Mom, you keep saying this about prime And now I can't say it anymore.

Because this is automatic. If the boomers If we use any of the expressions teenagers use, the word automatically becomes obsolete, rejected, marginalized. What our children want is to distance themselves from us in the way they communicate and find a space free of adults. This is why they fled from Instagram to TikTok and from TikTok to Be Real. The point is to not agree with us and to be able to keep going. chrome freely on their adult-free screens.

I must admit that both at school and at home I'm always surrounded by teenagers, and now I use more Anglicisms than I'd like. Digital culture has incorporated new expressions that go viral in a few hours and become part of everyday language. Some expressions are ephemeral and last less than the expiration date of a yogurt. We've gone from crush in the duo. Now it's time for the six seven which can be used in any context, and I don't even know if it will be trendy by the time I finish writing this. A lot of youth slang is picking up the same frenetic pace as Instagram stories. I really like that this is happening and that young people are able to generate their own immediate language that identifies them. After all, we did the same thing with phrases like "it blows my mind" or "that's heavy." Now I see it written down and we really were such dorks.

Catalanize Anglicisms

It must be said that on social media, many content creators make an effort to Catalanize expressions we've always heard in English. It completely steals my heart that they say "descape" instead of...unboxing" or have "it happens" instead of "FOMOThis perhaps requires an explanation: the FOMO It comes from English and means "fear of missing out," the fear of missing something or an activity with friends. Having "pasa" is the same thing, the fear of not being there. Don't tell me that's not well thought out. That fashion designers are already talking about it Looket The idea of ​​neutralizing the letter "o" to Catalanize the expression seems like a great way to try and make the language as much our own as possible. What can I say? I love that our language is so alive and adaptable.

I'm sure many will come out now. haters They'll smoke me for defending the idea that teenagers should continue creating and maintaining their own evolving language. If you'd like, we can have a minute of silence for all those words that have fallen out of use, or for all those diacritical marks we've lost along the way. Not to mention the weak pronouns we suffered so much with in school and now value as if every sentence were a gift. Give them away. The enemy isn't the Anglicisms we're bombarded with on screens; you know the enemy is something else. And the goal of families, teachers, and teenagers must be the same: to keep Catalan alive, active, and the language of reference. We want a fully-fledged Catalan, where the only weakness is pronouns. Let's all work together to make Catalan its own again. prime.