Every year, brands and dictionaries roll out their official “Words of the Year.” But more often than not, they’re reflecting the language young people use and make impossible to ignore, not just an overall cultural theme. The way the young gens speak online sets the tone for pop culture, marketing, and how everyone else describes what’s happening in the world. Even in Europe, where young consumers are speaking different languages, online slang and viral topics connect them, creating a shared culture when they look back at the year. For brands, paying attention to the words Gen Z and Millennials find most notable themselves is a real window to youth culture—and understanding them is a crucial way to avoid sounding cringe to young consumers. (But more on cringe later.) While many of this year’s official picks—whether Oxford’s “rage bait”, Langenscheidt Verlag’s “Das crazy,” Treccani’s “fidicuia” (trust), or Cambridge’s “parasocial”—clearly come from Gen Z and Millennials, most of these lists didn’t actually ask the people who use the slang every day....
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