Twenty years ago, it would have been common to hear someone bragging about how they had just made a lot of “cheddar.”  But they weren’t talking about cheese.

“Cheddar” was a word used in the ‘90s that equated to the word “money.”  This word seems weird to a person of the 21st century, but slang terms used today are just as nonsensical.

If taken out of context, the phrases teenagers use have completely different meanings than they are intended.  The phrase “I’m dead” is used when someone finds something really funny.  Someone oblivious to this slang phrase might be concerned about the person speaking.  A few other words, “shook” and “triggered,” have similar meanings of being emotionally moved by something.

These phrases seem to get popular extremely quickly.  Once one person starts saying a phrase, it becomes part of the common dictionary.  But who is the person who gets to decide that “salty” no longer applies to food and more often applies to a person with an attitude?

Fifty years from now, there will probably be a whole new Urban Dictionary with a huge slew of words with completely new meanings.  The people of that era will probably look back at the words used in 2017 and wonder “what were they thinking?”