what we say, you cannot hear
(and we would like to keep it that way)
not for parents. not for teachers. not for the algorithm, though the algorithm already knows.
my mum found my finsta once. not found like she searched for it—found like she was scrolling through my phone looking for a photo of us at christmas and hit an account she didn’t recognise and kept going. she didn’t say anything for three days. then she sat down with me and said, very carefully, “i saw some things i didn’t understand,” and i said, very carefully, “yeah,” and we both understood that the conversation was over before it started, because what she had seen was not a secret life, not a crisis, not something that required intervention or a phone call to the school counsellor. what she had seen was a language she didn’t speak, and the thing about a language you don’t speak is that there is nowhere to start.
this is what i want to talk about. not the finsta specifically. the language.
we have built one. not deliberately, not as a conspiracy, not because we sat down and decided to encrypt our communications against adult surveillance—though the effect is encryption, and the surveillance is real, and the encryption is working. we built it the way you build anything when the existing materials don’t fit what you’re trying to make: by improvising, by borrowing, by pushing available words into new shapes until they describe the thing you’re actually trying to describe rather than the thing the existing vocabulary thinks you should be describing. the existing vocabulary was built by people who are not seventeen in 2025, and it shows, and we fixed it.
the basic unit is the abbreviation, but calling it an abbreviation is already wrong, the way calling a cathedral a building is technically accurate and completely beside the point. Iykyk—if you know you know—is not just a compression of a sentence. it is a gate. it says: this thing i am about to say has a community of people who will receive it correctly, and if you are not in that community, the gate is closed, and the fact that the gate is closed is part of what i am saying. the phrase does not just carry information. it carries a map of who is inside the conversation and who is standing outside it, and this map is often more important than the information itself. my parents read iykyk and think it means “this is an in-joke.” it means that, but it also means: the in-joke is the entire point, and the point is specifically that you are not in it.
npc is a good example of the double-working. npc means non-player character, which is a term from gaming that describes the figures in a game world who are not controlled by the player—the background figures who repeat the same actions, the same phrases, the same routes through the environment, without variation and without awareness that they are doing so. we use npc to describe people who move through their lives on a script, who give the expected response to every situation, who do not appear to be making decisions so much as executing a pre-installed programme. this is not always an insult. sometimes it is an observation. sometimes it is almost affectionate. but the important thing is that the word comes loaded with an entire philosophical framework about agency and awareness and the difference between living and performing the motions of living, and that framework travels with the word everywhere it goes. when i say someone is being very npc about something, i am not just saying they are boring. i am saying they are operating below the level of self-awareness that would be required to notice they are operating below the level of self-awareness. the word does a lot of work. it does it very fast. adults who have not played the games cannot follow the work.
the speed is part of the point. our language moves faster than monitoring can follow, not because we are running from anything in particular but because we are responsive in a way that slow languages cannot be. a new thing happens—a moment, a situation, a feeling that does not have a word—and within a cycle of the internet that can be measured in hours, a word exists. delulu arrived and described the specific quality of believing something so hard that the believing starts to look like a plan, the unrealistic hope held so consistently that it becomes a personality. rent free described the way a thought or a person or a situation can live in your head without paying for the space, taking up residence and refusing to leave. giving as a verb—it’s giving followed by whatever it is giving—described a quality of emanating, of radiating a thing, in a way that the noun form never could, because the noun form would say what something is and the verb form says what something does, what it produces in the environment around it, which is the more interesting question.
by the time you are reading this, some of these words will have already moved. some will have become so widely used that adults are deploying them on company social media accounts, which is the reliable signal that a word has been fully colonised and should be vacated. slay went through this. vibe went through this. lit went through this. the colonisation happens not because adults are malicious but because they are eager, which is almost worse—they see a word doing something they find appealing and they adopt it and they deploy it with such enthusiasm that the word loses the precise charge it had, the specific frequency it operated on, and becomes a general-purpose positive that means nothing very much. when a supermarket chain tweets this Monday is giving main character energy the word giving has approximately two weeks left before we need to find somewhere else to live.
this is not a complaint about adults. i want to be precise about this, because precision matters and because imprecision about adults is its own kind of laziness. adults are not the enemy of the language. they are the reason the language keeps moving, and a language that keeps moving is a language that stays alive, and staying alive requires pressure, and the pressure adults provide—by watching, by adopting, by misunderstanding and then over-understanding—is the pressure that forces the language to generate new forms faster than the monitoring can process them. we are in a permanent low-level evolution, and the selection pressure is surveillance, and what survives is whatever is currently too fast or too specific or too layered to be easily absorbed.
the layering is where the real work happens. the most useful words operate on at least two levels simultaneously, and the two levels are not in conflict—they are the same thing seen from different angles, and the angle you see depends on where you are standing. understood the assignment means: did the thing correctly, with full awareness of what the thing required. it also means, in its ironic deployment: did the thing so precisely and so completely that the doing of it becomes its own kind of art. and in its most ironic deployment: did a thing that was so exactly the wrong thing that it constitutes a kind of genius. the same four words, the same grammatical structure, producing three completely different meanings depending on the context and the delivery, and adults who have not been inside all three contexts will land on the wrong one reliably and not know they have done so.
this is the thing about a private language: the privacy is not in the words. the words are public. anyone can look up understood the assignment and get a definition and feel they have understood what the phrase does. the privacy is in the knowing of when each level applies, which is knowledge acquired not from a definition but from sustained participation in the context where the word lives. you cannot look up the context. you have to have been there, and being there is a matter of time and age and the specific experience of being young right now in a world that has been thoroughly documented and thoroughly monitored and that still, somehow, contains entire territories that the documentation and the monitoring cannot reach because they move too fast and mean too much and require too much previous exposure to navigate.
i know adults who are very sincerely trying to understand. i find this touching and also slightly hopeless, not because the effort is wrong but because understanding is not really what the language is for. the language is not a puzzle. it is not a code to be cracked. it is a way of being together in a specific time and place, and the together-ness depends on the together-ness, which is a circular thing to say but is accurate. you cannot acquire the language and then enter the together-ness. the together-ness comes first, and the language is what the together-ness sounds like from inside.
my mum sat down with me and said she had seen things she didn’t understand, and i said yeah. what i meant by yeah was: i know, and i know you know, and the gap between us in that knowing is not a failure of communication. it is communication, of the most accurate kind. it says: you were seventeen in a different world and i am seventeen in this one, and those are different jobs with different tools and different languages, and the fact that your language cannot fully enter mine does not mean either of us is wrong. it means we are each fluent in our own time, and fluency in your own time is not nothing.
it is, in fact, the whole thing.
understood the assignment. you can look it up. you will get the first level. the second and third levels are iykyk.
and if you know, you know.
the author is aware this essay will be read by adults. the author is at peace with this. the author has already moved on.
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