Bizarre Gen Alpha slang like gigachad puzzles parents: Like a foreign language

Are you slay? Not if you don’t know this Gen Alpha lingo.From “mewing” and “slaying” to “sigma” and “rizz,” youngsters’ slang is perplexing parents more than ever before.“When we had slang there were only a few phrases that we had to keep up with, and you could kind of guess what they meant,” Dallas stay-at-home mom Jen Kim, 38, told The Wall Street Journal.“This is a whole vocabulary that we’re trying to decode.”Her niece, a trendy 10-year-old named Avery, said that a gift of colored pencils was very “slay” — which Kim correctly assumed meant “good” — and was appalled that Kim’s husband claimed to have “rizz,” or charisma.“She gave him a look, like, ‘No, you have no rizz,’ and started putting him down with all of her insults she knew in her toolbox,” Kim recalled, adding that Avery hurled terms at him like “omega,” or “the lowest rate you can get,” per the tween.Kim, by association, was labeled as “beta,” knocked down a peg from alpha.“Because I married him, that brought my stock down,” she said.According to middle school educator Philip Lindsay, there are more than two dozen slang terms that are uttered in his classroom in a given week.Those include “sigma,” or cool; “gyat,” used to express surprise when seeing someone attractive; or “skibidi,” a reference to a viral YouTube video that can mean either good or bad, depending on the context.The Journal headline also highlighted the term “gigachad,” which describes “an individual who is exceptionally masculine, physically attractive, and muscular,” according to Wikihow, adding that the term is “an idealized version of a ‘chad,’ which is a stereotypically confident and handsome man.” (Think: Greek god.)Many of the terms — some of which have been banned in certain schools — often have roots in other cultures, originating from African-American and LGBTQ+ communities, experts tell The Journal.But the proliferatio...