I saw this on Fark. It’s a story about how Sept. 11 has led to new slang words teens are allegedly using.
Now the byline says it’s a Washington Post reporter, so I think they should share some of the blame for this. Anyway, I hope the kids interviewed in this story were pulling the wool over the eyes of the reporter, because if not, they are some of the biggest losers in the country.
Here is a real quote from the story:
“My friends call me ‘terrorist’ or ‘fundamentalist,’ sometimes as a nickname,” said Nabeel Babaa, 17, who came to this country from Kuwait when he was 3 years old and is now a senior at Sherwood High School in Olney. “It’s not hurtful in the way we say it, ‘cause we are kidding around with each other.”
Aside from these kids coming off as total dorks, this is journalism of the worst kind, and seems forced at best. One of those “let’s invent a trend and see if we can find a handful of kids to confirm it, then generalize it to every teenager in the U.S.” deals.
The whole thing reminded me of an old Doonesbury strip where Zonker convinced Roland Hedley. who was doing a story for Time about college life, that a lilac bush was a marijuana plant, among other things.
I agree that you can’t generalize. Post-9-11, I see fewer and fewer of my peers referring to “hijack pizza*.”
But that quote - that kid’s “friends” are just plain mean little bastards. Nevermind that our buddy’s from Kuwait, which is (unless I’m just stupid) somewhat low on terrorists, he’s Middle Eastern! Therefore, we can give him nicknames like “terrorist”!
Am I the only one who’s really pissed off by this?
*hijack pizza = pizza bought from a delivery guy by pretending to be the chump who ordered it, then running off and eating it, leaving the chump who ordered it to call the pizza place and get into a shouting match over whether or not they delivered the pizza.
Didn’t the Washington Post get burned on this type of story once before? I seem to remember someone printing some list of “teen slang” from about 10 years back that included phrases such as: “Catch you on the flippity-flop-flop” etc that it turned out a bunch of teens had made up to jerk them around.
I am going to call it for the bad case of making shit up, that it is! I have two sixteen year old sisters and i never hear them call someone a terrorist, like that.
