Time Has Not Been Kind
Language moves fast, and generational slang moves faster. What sounds effortlessly cool at 24 can sound genuinely embarrassing at 34, and the phrases millennials practically built their identities around are no exception. Some of these expressions were fun while they lasted. Others were always a little cringe-worthy, and we just couldn't see it yet. A few made the leap into everyday speech, only to land awkwardly once the novelty wore off. Here's 20 millennial phrases that haven't exactly held up with age.
1. "That's So Random"
This one was everywhere from roughly 2005 to 2012, deployed to describe anything from a weird coincidence to a stranger wearing a funny hat. The problem is that "random" stopped meaning anything specific and started meaning "I find this mildly surprising." It aged into meaninglessness.
2. "I Can't Even"
At the time, cutting yourself off mid-sentence felt edgy and knowing, like the emotion was too big to finish the thought. Now it just reads as someone who started talking and gave up. The phrase had a shelf life of about three years before it became a parody of itself.
3. "Amazeballs"
There's really no salvaging this one. It arrived with a burst of ironic enthusiasm around 2010 and never quite left the ironic wrapper, which should have been a warning sign. Even people who loved it at the time tend to wince a little now.
4. "YOLO"
Few phrases burned as bright or fell as hard. "You only live once" is a perfectly reasonable philosophy that somehow became the rallying cry for questionable decisions and eventually a punchline. Drake is arguably still recovering from coining it.
5. "Totes McGotes"
Adding fake last names to abbreviations was a whole era of humor that felt spontaneous once and then, quickly, did not. "Totes" on its own survived. "Totes McGotes" deserved a more dignified farewell.
Clayton Cardinalli on Unsplash
6. "Nom Nom Nom"
This was how adults described eating food on the internet for an embarrassingly long window of time. It came from a meme, which is not inherently a problem, but watching it migrate from Tumblr into actual spoken conversation was something no one was ready for.
7. "Swag"
Swag had a legitimate run. It meant confidence, style, an ineffable coolness. Then it got adopted by every brand, school, and HR department trying to seem relatable, and it was over. Corporate swag is now primarily a term for free tote bags at conferences.
8. "Hashtag [Anything]"
Saying the word "hashtag" out loud before a word — hashtag blessed, hashtag goals, hashtag nofilter — made sense on social media. In actual conversation, it was always a little strange. Now it mostly signals that a person discovered Twitter in 2011 and still lives there emotionally.
9. "Epic Fail"
The internet borrowed "epic" from gaming culture and attached it to everything that went wrong, from spilling a coffee to larger national embarrassments. The phrase peaked around 2009, spawned several YouTube compilations, and has since mostly been retired to wherever "fail" videos go.
10. "I'm Literally Dying"
Hyperbole is fine. Hyperbole is fun. But "literally dying" was used so frequently to describe things like a funny tweet or a cute animal video that the word "literally" essentially gave up and stopped meaning anything. Linguists have written about this. It's not great.
11. "Bae"
Bae came in fast, meaning "before anyone else" or possibly just a shortened "babe," and for a while it was genuinely charming. Then it got branded. Subway called their sandwiches bae. When sandwich chains get hold of your slang, the slang is gone.
12. "On Fleek"
This phrase had arguably the shortest peak-to-cringe ratio of any expression on this list. It exploded in mid-2014 and was essentially dated by late 2015. It meant something was perfect, usually eyebrows. Almost nothing ages worse than hyper-specific compliments about hyper-specific things.
13. "Squad Goals"
Squad goals meant your friend group was aspirationally tight-knit, glamorous, or fun. The problem is that it was immediately adopted by brands trying to sell things to friend groups, and also it turns out most people's squads do not have goals so much as shared group chats they forget to check.
14. "Adulting"
Calling basic adult responsibilities "adulting" was both relatable and, in retrospect, slightly self-defeating. It was a way of laughing at the gap between expectation and reality. Over time it started to sound less like self-aware humor and more like an excuse not to do laundry.
15. "Throwing Shade"
This one actually had roots in ball culture long before millennials got hold of it, which is worth acknowledging. The diluted mainstream version used to describe any mild criticism or sideways glance missed most of what made the original expression sharp.
16. "Basic"
"Basic" meant someone whose tastes were predictable and mainstream, which was a legitimate observation about a real phenomenon. The problem is that the word got used so broadly it started describing anyone who liked anything popular. At a certain point, enjoying autumn made you basic, and the whole framework collapsed.
17. "Fetch"
This one is technically from Mean Girls, not organic millennial speech, but an entire generation tried to make it happen anyway. The joke was that Gretchen Wieners couldn't make it happen. The meta-joke was that millennials kept trying. It never happened.
18. "That's What She Said"
This arrived via The Office and then lived rent-free in every conversation for the better part of a decade. The joke requires setting up an accidental double entendre and then announcing it, which sounds fine once and somehow kept happening thousands of times after that.
19. "Winning"
Briefly, in early 2011, Charlie Sheen had a very public meltdown and declared himself "winning" constantly. For reasons that probably say something about collective psychology, this got picked up everywhere. It faded quickly, but the months it existed were a strange time to be alive.
20. "It Is What It Is"
This one technically survives, which almost makes it worse. "It is what it is" is a phrase that means nothing, accepts everything, and asks nothing of anyone. It was never slang so much as a verbal shrug. The fact that it's still in rotation is either proof of its utility or evidence that some phrases are just too shapeless to die.
