At the annual Gen Z quiz conducted over the Christmas dinner table I discovered a lot of new words. I “ate” in this contest which means I did quite well in the quiz, getting 11 out of 16 this year, a respectable score. My husband did not “cook” quite so hard. (For ancients like me, to cook now means to do well or to complete something). He only got 6½. Meanwhile, I was “giving” and “serving” internet slang savant.
Even though I am no longer on social media I generally pride myself on being well up on the latest online language. I know my Yup Bros from my Road Men. It’s always interesting to see how language evolves and how younger generations creatively take words that already exist, delusional or deluded say, and turn them into something else. Delulu was one of the words on the quiz that tripped some people up. Delulu is defined as someone who believes things that aren’t true, like if a person believes it’s completely grand to capture world leaders to distract people from the Epstein files or that celery is tasty. A delulu person in your workplace has notions or thinks they are more competent than might actually be the case. The word originated apparently from the K-Pop fandom to describe young girls who are so delulu they are convinced they will end up marrying their idols.
Another word I learned during the quiz set by a clever Gen Zer was gyatt (or gyat) which turned out to be “an exclamation of surprise or admiration, typically aimed at someone with large, attractive buttocks”. In my day we’d just say nice arse and be done with it, but that doesn’t cut it any more. So gyat it is.
I also learned about mogging, a new one on me. This is when a young man or young woman is going out with someone more conventionally attractive than the other person. We used to call it punching. I already knew about “lowkey”. I don’t know if you’ve noticed but if you talk to the youngs these days every other word is lowkey. They lowkey liked their dinner. They lowkey did not expect to get a B in that exam. They lowkey love that Olivia Dean song, the one about bumping into her ex for a couple of minutes. One of the adults doing the quiz wrote as their actual answer “lowkey means lowkey”. The Gen Zers present rolled their eyes so far into their heads I thought we were going to have to take them to A&E. (Low-key, with a hyphen, used to mean something that was quiet, a low-key wedding for example. But these days it’s used as an adverb to soften a statement or a confession and it’s unhyphenated. “I lowkey wish social media didn’t exist”. Lowkey in this way can replace kind of. Or sort of. You can use it to amaze people with a surprising fact about yourself: “I lowkey like celery.”)
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One thing that wasn’t on the quiz was fibremaxxing. Probably because the youngs who set the quiz are more into chicken wings smothered in Frank’s hot sauce than they are into bran. Fibremaxxing is a wellness trend where people eat a lot of chickpeas and other fibre rich whole foods as a health hack. According to one online supermarket in the UK, sales of prunes and the high fibre grain spelt were up by 60 per cent last year because of fibremaxxing. I’ve not joined this bandwagon. I ate prunes only once last year and that was as a calorific dessert accompanied by lashings of mascarpone and I’m no nutritionist, but I’d say all the Italian cream cheese probably cancelled out the fibremaxxing effect.
All this is by way of introducing you to another new trend for 2026, which I read about in New York Magazine. It’s called friction-maxxing and I am, as I hope the kids still say, here for it. Over to Kathryn Jezer-Morton who brilliantly coined this phrase and wrote an excellent essay to back it up: “Tech companies are succeeding in making us think of life itself as inconvenient ... reading is boring; talking is awkward; moving is tiring; leaving the house is daunting ... these are all frictions that we can now eliminate, easily, and we do.” Her thesis is that a sick joke is being played on all of us, that we’re being infantilised by all the tech that eliminates inconvenience, from location sharing and taxi apps to the food ordering services some of us rely on a bit too much.
She has suggestions as to how we might lean into friction-maxxing, which is essentially a way to build up our tolerance for inconvenience in an era when inconvenience is under attack. A huge one is to stop using ChatGPT for things like meal planning or (a friend confessed to this recently) therapy. I used it myself to make an itinerary for a holiday when I could easily have done it myself. I use location sharing to track my teenagers’ movements when a simple “where are you?” by text would do the job. (If removal of location sharing means you might worry a bit more, the author says that’s okay. Worrying is part of the friction of life).
[ Saunas, cinemas and listening to albums: 25 ways to get off your phoneOpens in new window ]
As someone who likes things to come easy, it resonated with me when Jezer-Morton suggested inviting more friction into our lives. I thought of how I gave up learning guitar years ago because I couldn’t master the F chord. F for friction.
Shortcuts are no harm occasionally. But when we shortcut everything, what do we lose? This year, let’s embrace the mild inconveniences that life throws at us instead of always looking to escape them. That would be delulu. At least I’m nearly sure it might.
