I was on a rollercoaster with my kids recently and the ride, apparently, was “skibidi”. The hot dogs were also skibidi; the entire theme park was skibidi – but I, when I screeched about how I wasn’t going to spend another £15 on tokens for more goes on a giant teacup that spins you round fast enough to give you whiplash, thank you very much, was not skibidi. I was not skibidi at all.
I could have been, though – because the Gen Alpha slang term “skibidi toilet” (confused, yet?) can also mean something terrible, depending on the context in which it’s said and used. So, maybe I was skibidi?
Either way, this lexical nightmare has entered the dictionary. That’s right: “skibidi” is one of a plethora of more than 6,000 new words to have made it in to the Cambridge Dictionary, along with “delulu” (shorthand for “delusional” and once spoken out loud – in public – by the Australian prime minister Anthony Albanese, who said his rival Lib-Nat coalition was “delulu with no solulu”).
The term “tradwife”, which takes us right back to stereotypical 1950s gender roles, meaning women who choose to stay home looking after the children and cooking, also made the cut.
“Mouse jiggler” has also been added, meaning a device someone may use to give the illusion they’re actually busy when they’re homeworking, which I’ve never heard of. How “brain rot” (Oxford’s word of the year for 2024) of me.
Now, I like to embarrass my children as much as the next parent who still believes very strongly they are young and hip and cool; and so one of my favourite pastimes is intentionally bastardising the language of my Gen Alpha and Gen Z kids.
That means that when we watch a film together, I will casually and entirely intentionally decree it as “sigma”; except pronounced like this: “Wow, that was sigmaaaaaaaa.” I will get dressed to go out and then ask my 13-year-old daughter if she thinks I’ve got “rizz”; if I “slay”.
When they’ve fully collapsed with cringe, I will sometimes get on my high horse and tell them that, actually, the word “sigma” has darker underpinnings; popularised by the likes of ultra-chauvinist Andrew Tate, who uses it to describe a “high-value male” like him, or so he believes. I would argue that being held in Romania over charges of trafficking and money laundering isn’t very “sigma” and is actually quite “brain rot”, but there we go.
My daughter, though, argues that while it may have meant that once, in origin, “it doesn’t mean that anymore”. “It’s changed, Mummy! Like you always go on about with Shakespeare.”
And she is correct, Mummy does go on about Shakespeare. Specifically: the way that language, over time, is organic – it grows and shifts and changes; it is fluid and not static. Words and phrases can outlast their originator and transcend their original meaning. Sometimes they turn back on themselves and become their entire opposite, like “sick” (“That is sick, bruv!”)
They can also have surprising tenacity, too, such as in the case of the phrases “wear your heart on your sleeve” and “break the ice” and even “wild goose chase” – which date back to Othello, The Taming of the Shrew and Romeo and Juliet, respectively. No cap.
But that doesn’t mean I want “skibidi toilet” added to the dictionary. Far from it.
Why? Well, to be honest, I think silly internet phrases that are so clearly meme-coded only cheapen language – they don’t enhance it. And a lot of that is to do with where they come from: the phrase first appeared in the “Skibidi Toilet” online series on YouTube, originally posted by Alexey Gerasimov. The animated film sees a battle between human-headed toilets and humanoid beings with electric devices for heads (of course). The phrase itself apparently derives from the lyrics of “Give It to Me” by Timbaland, sped up to sound like “skibidi”.
It’s silly and frothy and ephemeral and of the moment – and while it may have its place among kids in school corridors, I don’t believe it warrants the gravitas that adding it to the Cambridge Dictionary suggests (they have said they only add words with “staying power”). Neither does the word “snackable”, which has also been added this year (meaning content you engage with only fleetingly and briefly, because of our shrinking attention spans).
In fact, the combination of both of these words and phrases in the dictionary this year just about sums up my problem with it.
The real issue I have with “skibidi” is that it is snackable. My kids say it, for now, but then we used to say “Yo, yo, spex”, meaning “respect”, when we passed each other in the school lunch hall in 1994.
We grew out of it, just like Gen Alpha will grow out of “skibidi” – and now cringe that we ever used it in the first place. The last thing they – or the rest of us – need is a reminder of it, forever, in the dictionary.
Though it might, actually, have a surprisingly positive effect – legitimising slang takes away its cool creds, so perhaps “skibidi” will now die because of its inclusion. That would be lit.
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