Teenagers and Language
Since 1915, adults in the U.S. have made huge vocabulary gains and young people only modest ones. Now, that’s a symptom of the growing potency of teenage subculture. Rather than being socialized into the adult speech community, teenagers are resistant. They can understand what you say but they’re reluctant to use your language and they want to retreat into their own dialect. In 1950, I could both understand my parents’ language and use it. Teenage subculture is a modern phenomenon and quite bizarre. I was 16 years old in 1950 and it never occurred to any of us that we were in some blessed state that we wanted to perpetuate.