YOU only learned what ‘goblin mode’ is when pensioners did, and now everyone’s swapping new terminology and you’re nodding like a dickhead at these:
Fintech
You saw it, you assumed it had something to do with fish, you moved on. But now your brother-in-law’s got a job in it, and you’re in a cold sweat because you’re going to have to appreciate how impressive it is that he’s blockchained the cloud with AI learning.
Simp
You overheard your kids using it and made the error of asking ‘What’s wrong with being a simp? Surely it’s just a sympathetic person?’ Now every time you smile at your wife your son accuses you of ‘simping’ over her, and you can’t deny it because you have no f**king clue what you’d be denying.
Cuck
It took a while before you realised that you already knew this one from when you did Chaucer at A-level in 1996. But how did cuckolding become so commonplace that it needed shortening? And how does a random bloke on the internet know you’ve been suspicious of your wife and her mate Tony for a while?
Polycule
A word that’s yet to come up in your marriage, you get the principle of ‘poly’ – you’ve heard of Mormons – but a large group of sexually involved people living happily together is a folly of the young that you want nothing to do with. It’ll all end in seven-way acrimony like your student house.
Yeet
Used as a verb, as in yeeting, but then everything gets f**king verbed nowadays. Kids are always saying ‘I’m going to Wednesday Addams that dancefloor’ and expecting you to know what it means. They usually seem to be yeeting things they dislike. But if you say ‘I’m yeeting this dog’ they’ll laugh at you.
Mid
And now everyone’s saying things are ‘mid’. Christmas was apparently ‘mid’, as was the Taylor Swift album, a recent night out you weren’t invited on, and a cheese-and-ham toastie from the work canteen. All those things are great, so ‘mid’ must be a superlative. Later on you describe yourself as ‘mid in bed’. It will be brought up for the rest of the year.