People often seem to get annoyed easily with teenagers for using slang terms, yet they ignore the fact that humans have been abandoning traditional words for more hip lingo since the late 1800’s. 

For example, in 1870, people replaced the word “man” with “dude.” In 1970, people replaced the word “house” with “crib.” Both words are often still used in casual conversation today.

Slang terms were definitely popular in the past, but 2010 and onward have been the years of slang. Terms like “on fleek,” “basic,” “lit” and “bae” have all been defined by the Oxford Dictionary, despite the fact that they boil down to slang words made popular by people who have way too much influence on social media.

What is interesting is that most of these slang words are not entirely made up; their creators simply changed the meaning of an already existing word.

The Oxford Word of the Year for 2015 was an emoji: the “tears of joy” emoji. Not necessarily slang, but definitely not a word.  The emoji was not even a good one nor worth the title of “Word of 2015.” No one uses it to actually express tears of joy; it is most commonly used to express that they are laughing so hard they can not speak.

The slang usage in our society can get a little out of control at times, but for the most part it has not harmed society in anyway. If anything, it has benefited people so that they can now communicate more easily with a broad spectrum of informal words.