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Thus spake whippersnapper: kids using old-timey terms again [1]

['Rob Beschizza']

Date: 2026-02-10  

The kids are bringing back archaisms: old-timey language that's been out of use for decades, if not a century or more. Lummox, hoodwink, skedaddle, whence and hence… "Older slang is basically an earworm," an expert told the New York Times. "You just need to hear it once for it to be top of mind, but if you hear it over and over, it's definitely going to stick somewhere in your brain and can pop up unexpectedly anytime."

It's hard to determine exactly what catalyzed the return of "yap." Jonathon Green's Dictionary of Slang shows the word developing a usage as "pertaining to speech" in the 1900s, appearing in literature as a reference to mouths or to trivial chatter. A century later, "yapping" skyrocketed to popularity, generating enough attention to spawn variations like "yappuccino" — a serving of gab, extra foamy. At some point in early 2024, the yappers were loud enough to make media waves as a TikTok trend. Unlike so many Gen Alpha-isms, "yap" seems to have survived meme-dom and secured a place in the lexicon. Whatever its earworm-y point of origin, it seems we're going to "yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap" for the foreseeable future.

"There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen," as Lenin perhaps said. And sometimes a whole century goes vamoose and it's just the 1920s again.

Here's a good quote from Dr. Kirby Conrod, a sociolinguist: "Language change is a team sport. … You cannot get it going by yourself." Which is to say...

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