What was anyone ever talking about? People said things like “co-execute” and “upleveling”; they used “ask” and “attach” and “fail” as nouns. They joked about “adulting.” They substituted viral memes for social currency. They deployed internet slang as if it constituted a vocabulary—as if acronyms weren’t already standing in for other words. “You know that animated GIF of the stick figure?” a coworker in his early twenties asked, to describe his emotional state. I did not. “Lol,” he said, not laughing. Ha ha, I said. Not laughing.
