In on-going effort to keep current, to be able to understand what The Oldest is saying (or by saying it myself, totally take away the cool factor), I looked into this whole You Tube video phenomenon.

It’s not like You Tube is new or anything. It’s not like I didn’t know about You Tube. But it’s so expansive, so pervasive, that I had to look deeper.

First of all, anyone can pretty much post any video they want, right? That means you can watch other people play video games. Or you can see your favourite animal do your favourite animal things. Or you can see all kinds of parodies, even parodies of parodies.

Or watch someone’s altered, weird video of something normal.

And that’s where the kids are these days. Watching vids of loud people shouting at the screen while playing video games, looking at cats steal dogs’ bed,  or watching an altered version of a commercial, a speech, well, hell, pretty much anything.

Honestly, there’s so much on there that it’s impossible to list it all. But it’s from those videos that The Oldest began to take a turn to the dark side. He’d watch a funny video where they’d say intellllllllllll’ligent, like a computer had glitched the sound, so now when he’s in the mood, he’ll stretch out all his sounds like he’s having a stroke.

Strooooooke.

If I ever sound like that, it means call 911. Or I’ve been turned into a robot, in which case, call Sarah Connor.

But it’s something I just don’t get why it’s so funny. I hope my sense of humor has not withered like an old man baking in the sun, but when I watch one of those videos and The Oldest is laughing so hard there’s tears in his eyes, I can only stare at it and shake my head. I just don’t get it.

But from those videos, he’ll also pick up words like sus, which could be a video technique used to make the sssss all stretched out, or something cool that someone does, or something suspicious, or it can be a verb sometimes, or an adjective sometimes, or sometimes, a description. Honestly, I don’t quite get it, but I can get the context.

Sometimes.

I tried to get him to explain it to me. “What sus?”

“Sus!” he said, as if that explained everything.

“No, really what is it?”

“It’s sus, ok, sus,” he rolls his eyed and sighed as heavily as if he was talking to a 2 year old. “Sus!!!!” Then he did a very slow face-palm and walked away.

Not that enlightening, eh?

And that was about as much as he was willing to explain. However, I suspect if I chained him to a chair and threatened to make him watch 100 episodes of Ellen while bees crawled over his body, he’d still give me the same answer.

Why? Because I don’t think anyone really knows what it means. It’s just a word to be used when you want to use it. Or have a good giggle.

So, ok, fine. It’s the same for joj. That’s sus speak for someone’s name beginning with J. Or not. Or, oh who knows…

It’s all very confusing and very, very complex. Hell, try looking us sus here.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGMEWaTKP1M

But at least sus is a word. Like derpy, I kind of like it. We’ve stolen that one, too. And ‘Rickrolling” which is a bait and switch term, you know, like when you look at a site that says, ‘Sandra Bullock nude, again,” and you totally, completely accidentally click on it and it takes you to a site that rants about global warming or tries to sell you a monkey-semen-smoothie as an aphrodisiac.

I know keeping current is going to be a challenge. A huge one. But as a parent, you really have to make the effort. There’s some crap online. There’s some bad, bad stuff. And there’s a new language evolving. Best to be aware of it.

For a look at the internet and your child, check out these sites.

Parents Ultimate Guild to Youtube

Doc Brown – You think our netslang is bad? Check out English slang