Words and Graphics

Egyptian hieroglyphs or Gen Z slang, it’s all about the words. Ya dig?

Keep away from trouble and sing to it.
—Egyptian proverb

The party last night was dank!
—Gen Z-er

People who know about Egypt, archaeology, or linguistics or who are under the age over which we’re not supposed to trust us anymore will roll their eyes at the oversimplification in this post. That’s OK: I’m an English major, which means I know next to nothing about a lot and nothing deep about anything other than the moods and whims of the cats who inhabit my house.

The 1799 discovery of the Rosetta stone helped us understand a lot of the heretofore unfathomable art-slash-graffiti of the ancient Egyptians’ scribblings. According to History, English polymath Thomas Young and French linguist Jean-François Champollion presented their “breakthrough translation” in Paris in 1822.

You can go all geeky and check out a tome complete with an appendix that delves into all these scratchings and their meanings if you want to. Or you can just admire what a few of them tell us about the sorts of people who hung out in that Eden-esque land all those years ago. (Spoiler alert: mostly they were people like us minus the air conditioning.)

Y6, for example, references a specific piece in a board game. Hey-o, those guys walking around with their arms at right-degree angles liked to play Trivial Pursuit! Well, no; the game was likely “senet net hab.” Potato potahto.

OK, the game was anything but trivial: “senet net hab” meant “passing through.” The game, according to History, “is thought to represent the progression from life to the afterlife. Queen Nefertari’s tomb contains a painting depicting her playing senet against an invisible opponent; King Tutankhamun was buried with at least five senet boards.”

U37 meant “razor.” Yes! They had razors! The posh class used them; the great unwashed were less inclined to. (This is where we begin to get into the sticky bit with Egyptian politics of the day, which was swell if you liked absolute peace and security and few worries about crime but not so great if you wanted a different sort of job than the one you were assigned or were lower class or a woman or interested in something, anything, anything at all changing for, oh, several hundreds of years.)

Here’s a fun one: A36. It’s a dude leaning over a vessel. What’s he doing? Brewing beer.

Experts, please advise. Is there any culture in history that you know of where some sort of mind-altering substance wasn’t in use? What meaning should we take from this?

You can find lots more at History or by asking anybody who knows more than I do about this topic.

At the other end of the time spectrum, and regarding something I know even less about, there are our great hopes for tomorrow, if a tomorrow will be: the young ones. The ones who are defined by the last letter in our alphabet. (Experts, please advise: what meaning should we take from this?)

(As a matter of fact, no. We aren’t quite dead yet. A brave new generation is on the horizon, and our sturdy, all-purpose, marvelous alphabet—which, like the musical scale, is elegant in its simplicity—is here to serve. We’re simply starting over. Friends, I give you: the Alpha generation, born between the early ’10s and the early yesterday. But today we’re talking about Gen Z, those folks old enough to be out and of the world, some even gainfully employed.)

Gen Z kids were born between 1997 and 2012, according to an article in the Washington Post. ( I also learned, to my disappointment, that Gen Z folks are also called zoomers. No thanks, but they didn’t ask me.)

In this article, I learned about ways these folks are having trouble communicating with their older peers—and once again, they involve hieroglyphics! Or, well, OK, emojis. Potato potahto.

For example, according to this handy dandy test entitled “Cringe quiz: Are you fluent in Gen-Z office speak?”:

You send an email to a Gen Z colleague asking the person to complete a task. You add a smiley face emoji 🙂 at the end of your paragraph. Your Gen Z colleague becomes worried. Why?

The answer: the emoji makes her think she’s done something wrong:

Gen Z often finds greater nuance in different smiley face emojis than their older counterparts, Verheijen said. “It looks like it’s only slightly smiling. Gen Z interprets that as, ‘Okay, I guess you’re not really happy.’” That could change if a person uses one of the more enthusiastic smiling emojis, like the one with closed eyes and rosy cheeks 😊 or one smiling with an open mouth 😃. But by using the slightly smiling face, you may be unintentionally expressing uncertainty or a lack of positivity to your Gen Z colleagues.

No comment. I don’t want to be mean.

So there you have it. Hieroglyphs or emojis, we still can’t talk to each other.

Gen Z people have a whole pile of words I don’t understand. And some I have figured out but that still can be confusing for people who learned the opposite. “I died,” for instance, means it’s really funny. You know, because comics say “I killed” when they had a great show and made a lot of people laugh? So instead of saying “yer killin me” when you amuse them, the kids just cut to the chase: “I died.”

Another one: “slay” means “good job,” not, well, what Tybalt (and many others) did in the blood bath that is Romeo and Juliet.

But beyond that, I’m clueless. (I’m cheugy.) I could go on and on—it’s like discovering a civilization on Mars—but that’s another entry because it deserves its own article.

I’ll just note that among what I came across is a piece on how “terminology like and I oop, wig, tea, and periodt have roots in Black slang, which follows a cycle of slang appropriation.” That non-Black people have cribbed Black slang for ages is hardly Earth-shattering news, but I guess it’s reassuring that at least in this area our reality remains consistent. (Actually, I noted this little factlet mainly to set up this issue’s Lagniappe. )

Until next time: it’s been real, later gator, ta-da, ciao, and catch you on the flipside.

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Lagniappe. RIP, Martin Mull, my beloved scallywag.