When 21-year-old Kiana Sinaki, wanting to share a juicy tidbit of workplace gossip, told her 26-year-old co-worker at a health club in Santa Barbara, California, “I have tea for you,” the confused woman replied, “Oh, no, thanks. I’m sick of my very own tea bags.
This wasn’t the primary time Sinaki said she was misunderstood by a fellow millennial who, on this case, neglected Sinaki’s use of the Generation Z slang term “gossip” and as a substitute thought her younger colleague was offering her hot drink.
“I told some of my co-workers ‘No hat’ they usually had no idea what I was talking about,” laughs Sinaki, an environmental engineering student on the University of California, Irvine, who commonly surprises her more mature colleagues with her trendy lexicon.
![Kiani Sinaki often confuses his millennium associates with terms such as](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/12/kiana-sinaki.jpg?w=819)
The phrase “no hat” means “don’t lie” in African American English or AAVE, a black culture vocabulary from which much of the Gen Z slang is derived. The phrase was popularized in songs by Grammy Award winners Drake, Future and a pair of Chainz’ and.
The term and others like “vibe” and “I’m Gucci” have since change into mainstream expressions for 18- to 25-year-olds due to their exhaustive use in video games, YouTube and TikTok clips posts where the #GenZSlang hashtag has accrued over 26.8 million views.
And despite the staggering 65% of Gen Z who, according to an October survey, pledged to quit their jobs by the top of 2022, their very own unique way of speaking is as much a part of working life as water cooler gossip.
Natalie Jones, a 23-year-old Dayton.com reporter in Dayton, Ohio, garnered over 4.3 million views on TikTok in a video by which she challenged her 30-year-old co-worker to interpret buzzwords like “drip”, which refers to a person’s fashion sense, and “bet”, which simply means “okay”.
The uninitiated thirty-something couldn’t define terms accurately.
But Jones told The Post that it’s extremely essential for her to teach her workmates, mostly 15 to 20 years her senior, the jargon because it helps them sustain with the newest trends in the company climate, now driven by social media and popular culture.
“In a digital world that’s consistently changing, it is vital to stay informed and up-to-date,” said Jones. “Understanding Gen Z slang terms helps anyone create content for a wide selection of people. It allows the older generations to connect with the subsequent generation.”
Nonetheless, some TikTok users deliberately use cool meeting chats and emails to confuse senior co-workers. “Gaslighting my millennial collaborator to think he’s old by quizzing him on Gen Z slang,” bragged one user. Separate TikToker shared a clip where he tests his co-workers on slang for his own amusement and laughing at their wild misinterpretations.
But when 24-year-old Phoebe Kahn discovers her senior bosses littering up Gen Z slang, she laughs with them, not at them.
Most of the time, Kahn, a media content producer based in Melbourne, Australia, works time beyond regulation to be certain that her thirty-something boss doesn’t abuse the Gen Z lingo she taught him on the job.
“Once my boss tried it understand “Gucci”, which is one other word for ‘good’,” Kahn told The Post.
“But he thought the term was ‘gooch’ which has a completely different meaning!” she giggled, noting that “gooch” is usually used to refer to a specific area of the human genitals.
Despite the steep learning curve, picking up an unfamiliar language doesn’t just go a method within the workplace.
Sinaki admits that she also learned some precious terms from her older colleagues.
“They taught me concerning the Yellow Pages and explained to me what Rolodex is,” Sinaki said of the virtually archaic card index that once stored names, numbers, and addresses in an office.
“I just thought it was a really old Rolex.”