Photo credit: The Guardian
“I’m literally screwaming,” my friend tells me – except she’s not. I’ve just told her about my promotion at work. She raises her hands in front of her mouth as if to unleash a fearsome howl, but no sound comes out. She scrunches up her nose like a sneezing cat and lets out a hoarse cry. To the uninitiated, she may have seemed distressed – or in need of some urgent medical attention – but in Gen Z-code, I knew she was actually excited for me.
This is the Gen Z silent scream: the new behavioural motif used by the young to convey a muted kind of elation. The gesture has been picked apart endlessly online, with many filing it among a growing lexicon of supposedly baffling Gen Z-iasms: the blank “Gen Z stare” when asked a question; the carefully calibrated “Gen Z pout”; the ongoing discourse around crew socks, baggy jeans, and an almost reflexive frluency in therapy-speak, Gen Z may come across as delulu (delusional), but this is a generation that knows how to use irony as its superpower.
Many of the chronically online among us may have discovered the silent scream in comedian Caroline Cianci’s viral skits about the “Gen Z girl with no personality,” which have amassed over 200 million views on social media. As this character, the Los Angeles-based comedian takes on a vapid persona, and delivers deadpan lines like: “It’s giving tea” (It’s gossip-worth), “I’m feeling lowkey overstimmy,” (I’m overstimulated) and “That’s not…” (I don’t agree with you). She silently screams when the waiter arrives with her lunch (a “slay” salad).
Cianci’s videos have viewers cringing at how unbearably – and accurately – she portrays a certain type of Gen Z woman.
There’s no denying that there’s been a moral panic about how Gen Z – those born between 1997 and 2012 – are faring in society. It’s been catnip for the media, which tends to cast them as a generation of anxious, workshy overthinkers: more snowflake, even than the millennials before them. They’ve come of age in an unstable era, had their formative social years disrupted by Covid, and are often said to be lacking basic interpersonal skills as a result. But does the silent scream really indicate an inability to communicate, or is it simply part of an evolving language that older generations cannot speak?
The origins of the silent scream are difficult to pinpoint exactly, but there is evidence of content creators pulling the motif as early as 2022. The origins of the Gen Z vernacular go back much further. Much of the slang you see online, words like “period”, “slay” and “it’s giving,” have their roots in African American English (AAVE) and Black queer culture. The term “thriving” today originated in Black subcultures, beginning with the dropping of letters from certain words or the combining of entire phrases to form new expressions, and it has been melded together to form a globally understood language. Call it the TikTok dialect. Understanding what it really means is on an if you know, you know basis.
While slang has long existed in a gestural form, Gen Z has a much larger arsenal. There’s the finger heart (crossing the thumb and index finger to form a small heart shape), or the hair tuck (pushing real or imaginary hair behind your ear to convey a flirty or arrogant tone), and the “clock it” move (tapping the thumb, middle and index fingers in a sassy way, to indicate you’ve noticed a hidden truth). They have all become daily reference points for the young. It’s a lowkey flex. Aura points certified.
Source: The Independent
