Hoping this is ‘dec’

I spent sometime last week with a ‘squad’ of lively boys and girls who were teaching me teenage slang. Almost at once I discovered that the word ‘fit’ didn’t mean healthy but hot and sexy – love it. I learnt a lot about drinking habits which don’t seem to have changed much although the vocabulary has taken a shift and also found out how to express approval of something that is really quite good, although you describe it in a guarded way (so they told me) as ‘pretty dec’ which you pronounce deese to rhyme with peace and which is short for decent.

‘Crap’ is still widely used and so are all the other established swear words. But there were lots of new words too. The most often used being ‘bare’ which means extremely and is usually applied in a complaining way to something that is too much to be borne.

I found the whole experience wonderfully entertaining and enlightening, teenagers are such fun. I am going back for even more sessions with my ‘mentors’ because I need to know how to speak the language if I am to write it and there’s nothing like living in the country to teach you the language.

If there are any teenagers out there who would like to add to my vocabulary, I’d love to talk to them. Because when I start to write I would like my work to be ‘sound’.