You have got to feel for the Prince of Wales. How was he to know that the old English word ‘buff’, which has been around for years, doing sterling service for its country, had suddenly acquired a new meaning?
The Prince is a gardening buff. He has servants who buff his shoes for him. But ‘buff’ as a term of approbation was new to him.
Shown a photograph of himself, bare-chested, in his younger days and told he looked “quite buff”, the Prince was baffled. Prince William, also present at the event where the incident took place, had to explain to his father – as he would have had to do to 99 per cent of the population over 50 – that being called ‘buff’ was actually a compliment, akin to being called ‘fit’.
Buff is good. Buff is cool. Buff is wicked – although that word, too, has had a makeover and for the young means the diametric opposite of what it would have meant to Prince Charles when he was growing up.
Fashions in language change even quicker than fashions in clothes. Today’s middle-aged parents will have used words as teenagers which they had to translate for their own parents, while current masters of up-to-the-minute slang will one day be wrong-footed by their own offspring.
So test your street cred with this list of words and phrases that have been the cause of a gulf in comprehension between the generations.
Dench: Nothing to do with Dame Judi, although she is certainly a dench actress and looks dench for her age. A catch-all term of approbation for more or less anyone or anything.
Yolo: As used with tedious frequency in teenage text messages. Acronym for You Only Live Once. A real googly for long-suffering parents who have just worked out that LOL doesn’t stand for Lots of Love.
With it: Two of the simplest words in the language, but what misery they caused the older generation when they started to be yoked together in the ‘60s. “With what?” mused anxious elders as they listened dutifully to their teenagers’ Beatles records.
Skanky: Hip urban slang. You can tell it is derogatory just by the sound of the word, synonymous with ‘sluttish’.
Chill: Nothing disconcerts a middle-aged person more than being told to chill. They get the general idea, but have only ever been used to chilling champagne in the fridge. And just when they have learnt to chill, they have got to chillax. Purgatory.
Fit: A good example of a word changing meaning so subtly that older people miss the nuances. Once used to denote healthy, now denotes sexy, which is not the same.
Butters: If Prince Charles had been called butters rather than buff, his son would have had to take him to one side and explain that it was not a compliment. Teenage-speak for ‘ugly’.
Sick: Like ‘wicked’, a word that has rotated through 180 degrees, catching out the older generation. Earlier used to denote someone with tuberculosis or perhaps a prankster with a depraved sense of humour. Now applied to the newest, coolest, must-see rap artist.
Hang: It would help if the teenagers said “hanging out”, which is synonymous, but what teenager uses two words if they can get away with one?
The Daily Telegraph