Outworn

Now that my daughter is halfway from child to teenager, Jasmine starts to post WhatsApp Status update. Unsurprisingly, I'm beyond grateful and privileged to be allowed access to her interesting ideas and thoughts. It turns out to be a window into the new generation of lexicon.

I'll give you an example, which happened this week.

Soon after my daughter posted a picture with the caption "This Lego store is sick", I texted her and asked why it's sick. Obviously I was nonplussed. I dare say you'd be sharing the same query as mine when you peer through the upscale display of brick-by-brick design.

I blushed when my daughter texted me the answer. As it turned out, I knew too little about the word sick.

"Sick means cool, dude."

"Mmm," Jasmine explained, bemused by her parents' outdated lexicon. "Or else, we can type That's sick. NGL."

If, like me, you graduated in the last century (read "dinosaur"), you might need a bit of explanation.

After we'd found out the meaning of NGL (read "not gonna lie"), my wife summed up what she understood. "I see, that's more or less like saying Honestly speaking, it looks great."

"Okay, that's it," my daughter rolled her eyes. "That's ancient English, though."