In late 1992, a New York Times reporter called the offices of Sub Pop, then America’s most fashionable record label, to gain an understanding of what constituted “grunge” culture. Jonathan Poneman, one of Sub Pop’s founders, passed the call off to Megan Jasper, the label’s 25-year-old front-desk employee, who happily responded to the Times’ questions about the youth “lexicon” of the day.

“There really wasn’t a secret language” of grunge, Jasper later told a reporter. “It seemed like a fairly bizarre request. So, I just thought, ‘Sure. You want a lexicon? I will totally give you a lexicon.’”

Jasper proceeded to rattle off an entire phony grunge nomenclature while the Times reporter dutifully scribbled down the words. For instance, Jasper said the word for “loser” was “cob nobbler.” She explained that a “dish” was a “desirable guy” and that an uncool person was a “lamestain.” The act of “hanging out” was known as “swingin’ on the flippity flop.”

The entire list was later published in a Times sidebar titled “The Lexicon of Grunge: Breaking the Code.” A few weeks after publication, Jasper received an angry call from a Times reporter who had realized the whole thing was a hoax. But the grunge community in Seattle got the joke, and the former front-desk worker eventually became Sub Pop’s CEO.

Every generation has its own lingo, and this shift in language irritates every generation that came before. News articles such as the one that ran in the Times in 1992 are meant to signal to the preceding age cohort that their time behind the wheel of popular culture has passed.

Some cranky groups have made the fluidity of language their hobbyhorse. Each year, Michigan’s Lake Superior State University creates a list of words that should be “banished” from everyday use. Typically, these are words either invented or commandeered by the youth to express their sentiments. Last year, “cringe” topped the list (e.g., “making lists of banned words is so cringe”), followed by “dropped” (“a new Taylor Swift album just dropped”), “100%” (meant to indicate agreement), and “skibidi” (no one actually knows what this means). Other recently condemned words include Gen Z classics like “hack,” “rizz,” and “slay.”

It isn’t just Baby Boomers who have had enough. Even the Millennial writers and cast members at Saturday Night Live have ridiculed modern speech with sketches like “Gen Z Hospital,” in which host Elon Musk plays a doctor who has to break it to a group of teens that their bestie is hooked up to a machine, and unfortunately, the diagnosis is “looking like cap.”

Oftentimes, language shifts are accelerated by the use of old words in new ways. To “eat it” used to mean “to fall down violently.” It now means to really make the most of a moment, as in “when she gave that dramatic speech, she really ate it, no crumbs.” In the past, if you were a “drip,” you were a dork — now if you have drip, it means you have style. Women have recently bemoaned the surplus of “chopped” — that is, physically unattractive — men.

Similarly, this year, Merriam-Webster’s “Word of the Year” is “slop,” a commonplace word for “mud” that has transformed to mean “digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.”

Yet the new definition of “slop” has not pleased everyone. “Slop is the rare descriptor that obfuscates more than it clarifies,” wrote Tim Rice this week at the Wall Street Journal. “Overuse of the term is dragging us deeper and deeper into a definitional gray zone.”

We shouldn’t bemoan the way language bends, stretches, and pulls; we should celebrate its flexibility. Generation X popularized phrases like “whatever,” “as if,” “gnarly,” “bogus,” “chill,” “diss,” “talk to the hand,” and “gag me with a spoon.” Millennials further seasoned the linguistic stew with “bae,” “YOLO,” “FOMO,” “lit,” “basic,” “extra,” “shook,” “adulting,” “low-key,” “stan,” “clapback,” and “ghosting.” If you’re a Baby Boomer, you should believe that this creativity of language is “groovy.”

It’s not that young people are silly or flippant. They’re less set in their ways, so their verbal malleability can land them on a word their elders never stopped to consider. The word “sus,” for instance, is the perfect descriptor of someone who is “suspicious,” but in a less serious way. It takes a standard word and distills from it a slightly different feeling.

And thus, language innovations create order from chaos. As society progresses both culturally and technologically, new terms emerge to describe people’s feelings, and the best ideas rise to the top. There is no language czar — twisting the Queen’s English into something more useful today is verbal democracy at work.

Nonetheless, the linguistic traditionalists lie awake at night in anticipation of a future Supreme Court decision that determines a plaintiff has to “take the L” because their “sus” arguments are “cringe.”

Yet many of the same people who complain about the ways young people use language revel when older people redefine terms. For instance, for one president, the word “hoax” now means “anything I don’t like.” Does the use of the word “affordability” make you look bad? It’s a “hoax.”

Or consider the subtle but notable change from “Democratic Party” to “Democrat Party,” which has been taken up by prominent Ivy League graduates and deployed with disdain. Or the transmogrification of the word “woke,” which was initially used by liberals to describe a new clarity regarding racial and cultural issues but is now used to describe the overboard sensitivities of those very people.

New words or phrases shouldn’t scare anyone, and criticizing language innovation is simply ragebait (“ragebait” itself being a newly constructed word).

If anything, with the availability of social media, this should be a renaissance for new words and phrases. In the 1980s, comedian Rich Hall built a small empire inventing “Sniglets,” or words that should be in the dictionary but weren’t. Example: the little bits of crumbs that end up in the butter after spreading it on bread were deemed “toasticles.”

Young people, who can be annoying, should certainly learn proper language before bending it to their generation’s will. But creative language play through the generations has been a gift, expanding our understanding of different historical periods by at least six, seven times.