Last summer, the sentence “Livvy Dunne rizzed up Baby Gronk” circulated on social media, leading many internet users to declare themselves officially out of the loop with Gen Z slang. The phenomenon repeated a few months later when a song with similarly incomprehensible lyrics—such as “sticking out your gyatt for the rizzler”—went viral on TikTok.
The very-online members of Gen Z are largely unphased by these terms, which often stem from African American Vernacular English, also known as AAVE, or LGBTQ+ slang. Many Gen Zers have even reveled in older generations’ confusion around these terms and have blended them into sentences—or songs—that are incomprehensible to older viewers but clear to those of a younger generation.