When I joined Recess Creative as the agency’s youngest member last fall, everything was perfect: great people, great snacks, and great work—there was just one thing.
My millennial coworkers kept misusing a specific term.
I first noticed it during a morning meeting. Bill, who was heading out of town on vacation, expressed that he would be unreachable or “out of pocket” the following week.
How peculiar, I thought. That’s not the correct way to use that term. Perhaps this was just a Bill thing. A quirk of his, right?
Wrong
As I began to hear those three words used over and over as a way to say, “I’ll be unreachable”, I knew something was up.
After discussing with my fellow Gen Zers, it seemed we had all noticed the same thing. It was an odd mystery indeed– where did this phenomenon come from?
The next time Chris said he’d be “out of pocket”, we giggled. But you can’t just giggle and not explain. So we explained:
“Out of pocket means, like, someone’s going to be acting in a way that’s unhinged or uncalled-for,” one of us said matter-of-factly.
Then, we got schooled.
While we thought our older coworkers were the ones using the term incorrectly, that apparently wasn’t the case. In their eyes, they coined the phrase before we young folk adopted it and gave the words a whole new meaning.
Sigh. There are many such cases. Claw clips, vinyl records, wide-leg jeans… I should have known better.
After discovering that both uses of the term are relatively well-known, it became an inside joke throughout the office. We began using the term more often, with both meanings.
I have to admit, saying, “I’m going to be on a plane tomorrow, so I’m going to be “out of pocket” really rolls off the tongue. It gets the message across perfectly.
As for the newer definition, everyone around the office has been having jolly good fun using that, too.
It was only a matter of time before we realized that the “out of pocket” debate only scratched the surface and that there are, in fact, countless terms that mean different things to different generations.
A matter as serious as this one calls for a solution of equal gravity.
Enter: an entire Lunch & Learn presentation on Gen-Z lingo.
Generation Z
Born between 1997–2012, according to Encyclopedia Britannica.
The idea might sound goofy, but in addition to bridging the language barrier between coworkers, creating this presentation gave my Gen-Z peers and me an opportunity to work together on something near and dear to our hearts.
I’ll spare you an in-depth recap of our hour-long presentation, but here’s a glimpse at some of the highlights:
Instead of only including familiar terms, we took things a step further and dedicated an entire section to the words and phrases used by the next generation – Gen Alpha.
Generation Alpha
Born between 2010–2025, according to Encyclopedia Britannica.
This section made for a lot of research, without which the meaning of words like “skibidi” would be lost on us. All we knew was that they didn’t make sense to us.
And then it dawned on me: does Gen Alpha sound to us how we sound to Millennials? That very question has kept me awake countless nights since. I’m not sure if I even really want to know the answer.
Over the next several weeks, these nonsensical words would find their way onto the office fridge, and, as silly as this sounds, Gen Alpha lingo really united us as a team.
So thank you, Gen Alpha, for your service.
We can’t wait until you enter the workforce.
Want to partake in more office shenanigans? Apply here!