Yahoolibuzz
| Thursday, July 6th, 2006 | --Sean |
One of my fellow Yahoo!s was amused today by the fact that both his 9-year-old daughter and I use the phrase, "Oh snap!", which meant absolutely nothing to him but which (I think) is pretty common parlance for people under the age of 25. "Those crazy kids and their reappropriation of perfectly good verbs," I'm sure he was thinking. Sadly, even for a youthfully hip guy like me, I'm fairly disconnected to Generation Z or the tween crowd or whatever they call themselves. "Those crazy kids and their inability to type out simple words without resorting to inane abbrevations ('ur'? 'plz'? What?)," et cetera.
So, it's fairly interesting to glance over the Yahooligans! Buzz Index, which works just like the regular Buzz Index but operates off of searches performed from within Yahooligans!, presumably by kids (or adults going through very severe mid-life crises). For instance, the issues with the greatest longevity among the adolescent community are "Games" (ranked 2nd, as of today) and "Dogs" (8th), both having occupied a spot on the Buzz Chart for an astounding 685 days (and you thought kids had short attention spans). Today's youth is apparently tuning in to "BBC" (9th), but probably more for their play site "CBeebies" (11th) than for their unique international perspective. Among the toys, traditional "Barbie" (4th) is joined by strangely named "NeoPets" (5th) and "Bratz" (6th). And, of course, "dinosaurs" (17th) are making an appearance.
The kids probably found the close synonym, "my elderly coworkers", too hard to type.
(oh snap!)