My writer-acquaintance, I recognized, was not alone in bending language this way. The word had a wonderfully childish sound to it, the tacked-on y creating a new adjective in the style of happy, angry, and silly. Is OK boomer the best slang word in English? Vote in the Dictionary.I recently had the honor of meeting an award-winning literary sort, a man wry and restrained and overall quite utterly mature, who casually referred to having gone through a phase in his 20s when he’d been “pilly”-that is, when he’d taken a lot of recreational drugs. Silence, boomer and shut up boomer are used similarly to OK boomer. True to internet culture, OK boomer is also used more playfully or ironically in internet content (and products people can buy) about the sudden popularity of OK boomer, such as in TikTok videos that riff on OK boomer as a meme or Twitter commentary about the OK boomer phenomenon.Ī bunch of boomers only now getting OUTRAGED about 'ok boomer' after it showed up in the news is the most 'ok boomer' thing that could've happened These attitudes include a resistance to technological change, inclusivity of marginalized identities, denial or inaction on climate change, and a belief that the problems of youth are due to their laziness or entitlement as opposed to structural inequalities and a lack of opportunity. OK boomer can be used online to write off, usually to a humorous or mildly mocking effect, opinions that are perceived as emblematic of attitudes of boomers and older people more generally. The n-word is one of the most offensive words in the English language. Others, more controversially, took offense to OK boomer as ageist.īoomer is an informal noun referring to a person born during a baby boom, especially one born in the U.S. Lorenz’s article created a lot of buzz around the phrase OK boomer, with some internet commentators noting how the phrase (as is often the case for slang online) had already gotten overused. Teenagers use it to reply to cringey YouTube videos, Donald Trump tweets, and basically any person over 30 who says something condescending about young people - and the issues that matter to them. “Ok boomer” has become Generation Z’s endlessly repeated retort to the problem of older people who just don’t get it, a rallying cry for millions of fed up kids. Taylor Lorenz helped put OK boomer front and center in the internet discourse after her October 29 article in the New York Times called “ ‘OK Boomer’ Marks the End of Friendly Generational Relations.” In it, Lorenz writes: In 2019, memes, merchandise, songs, and many social media posts all helped further spread OK boomer. Go ahead and just keeping thinking your backwards, irrelevant thoughts that we’re just spoiled, tech-obsessed children when you’ve wrecked our job prospects and planet.”

It’s as if OK boomer says, “OK, you baby boomer. The specific slang expression OK boomer took off in early 2019, issued especially from millennials and Generation Z as a reply or reaction to older users (lumped together as baby boomers) who posted content that condescended to younger generations or provoked their sensibilities. This blame has contributed to the negative connotation of boomer, which-as seen in a phrase like OK boomer-dismisses a person from that generation (and older people more generally) as out of touch, close-minded, and part of the problem. While many baby boomers were connected to youth counterculture in the 1960–70s, they have since become blamed in the 2010s by people in younger generations for many societal woes, from the high cost of college tuition to the failure to address climate change. This generation generally includes anyone born in the US between 1946–65, a time of great economic prosperity. Boomer is an informal term for baby boomer, a person born during the baby boom (sharp increase in birthrates) after World War II.

Generational slang