Dear Geraldine,

I’m fluent in English, French, Italian, and Russian, yet utterly lost when my thirteen-year-old granddaughter speaks. The other day she turned up in tears, claiming there’s a boy at school she’s “delulu” about. One of her “fam” apparently accused her of being “too simp,” so she told them to “take a seat,” at which point they became “salty” and “ghosted”her.

After a full afternoon scouring the internet (and half a teapot of Earl Grey), I pieced together that she’s had a falling-out with a friend over a boy, who—as I understand it—hasn’t done a thing to deserve all this drama.

I pride myself on my linguistic agility, but this new dialect has me stumped. How can I hope to communicate with her when I need a translation app just to follow a sentence?

Yours,

Puzzled Polyglot

Dear Puzzled Polyglot,

You have my sympathies. Every generation invents a language to keep the rest of us out. In our day, we thought we were being terribly modern saying “fab” and “groovy.” My poor mother spent a whole summer thinking “groovy” meant something to do with record players. So, you see, confusion is a generational tradition.

The young haven’t changed, only the vocabulary. What sounds like nonsense is really the usual teenage muddle of friendship, pride, and a crush that feels like destiny. (We just didn’t have the nerve to call it “delulu.”)

My advice: don’t try to keep pace. Ask her to teach you. Teenagers love being the expert for once, and nothing bridges a generational gap faster than shared laughter over words neither of you fully understand. Translation may take time, but affection (thank heavens) remains perfectly fluent.

Affectionately bewildered,

Geraldine