These are trends I’ve noticed over the various group chats I’ve been a part of. I’m sort of writing this as a guide to the youths for boomers and the boomer-minded, who still do things like punctuate text messages.
The suffixes:
Everything-maxxing (spelled that way): Instead of saying they’re doing something like lifting or even sitting at home watching TV, people are increasingly saying that they are “gym-maxxing” or “chill-maxxing.” I think the origin of this is actually 4chan, where advice given to people looking to improve themselves was to “looks-maxx,” i.e. focus their efforts on improving their physical appearance. People that say this now aren’t necessarily 4chan aficionados, though, so the fact that this has caught on speaks to how much actual incel forums affect the mainstream.
Everything-coded: Instead of describing something/anything (behavior, people, etc.) as similar to something else, people are also increasingly saying that things are __-coded. For instance, instead of saying a Hawaiian man with long flowing hair looks like Jason Momoa, you would instead say that the man is “Jason Momoa-coded.”This is actually an older thing and has been around for a few years at this point, and seems to have stemmed from characters in Steven Universe (a show) labeled as “race”-coded implying that a reference to race or racism wasn’t immediately obvious, but is now being abused to the point just taking the place of a regular adjective.
Other things:
Girls asking questions with exclamation points: For instance, asking “how was the date!!” instead of “how was the date?” There’s probably nothing more to this than trying to introduce an element of playfulness and friendliness when asking a question, but it’s a little jarring when someone you know that has never used this suddenly starts using it. This kind of thing used to be conveyed via “!?” but I guess that has too much of a corporate or adult tone to it.
Knife emojis: This is potentially specific to my group chats, but across multiple chats and people I’ve noticed people either sending this or adding it as a reaction when they want to convey that they are mildly annoyed and want to convey violent thoughts, but don’t actually want to kill you in real life. E.g. “Dang, you aged bro!” —> knife emoji reaction.
Things I hate:
Reacting to yes/no questions with a thumbs up instead of typing out the word “yeah”: This is not a new thing, but I don’t think I will ever like this kind of low effort response to a direct question outside of Slack (for work). Some Zoomers find this passive aggressive and I probably have only ever done this when I am actively annoyed or dislike the person I’m responding to.