Beast Mode

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name’s Elaine, and I was calling about, I heard that you guys were talking about slang the other day, that kids use, that adults have no idea what it means.

Oh yeah, sure, every day.

And I work at a 5th and 6th grade intermediate school in Indianapolis, and one of my students kept using the word beast, as in, that is so beast, that song was beast, that BMX trick was beast. And I had never heard of such a word before.

Beast, B-E-A-S-T?

Indeed, yes.

Very good. I’m surprised to hear it from a 10- or 11-year-old. I thought it was like a college-age term.

Well, these kids have older siblings.

Oh, very good. That would explain it. And television, with television and Internet, stuff travels between age groups with no problem these days.

So did you talk with your student about this?

Well, yes, and I asked him, because he was using it in a way that other students that I’d heard hadn’t used, because he was saying, I beasted that. I was totally beasting that. And other students had used it as basically a synonym for awesome or cool. And he was using it in more verb form.

And actually, just recently I asked him again, so do you still say it like that? And he said, well, no, people said I was saying it wrong. So it was actually more used as a synonym for cool or awesome.

Very good. Yeah, he got corrected by his peers. That’s how slang comes to be definite. It starts out vague and indefinite, and that’s how it becomes precise, because your peers mock you for getting it wrong.

That was the impression I got. Doesn’t take long, does it? But beast is definitely part of the current slang of the younger generation.

I’m 40. I’m not young enough to fully qualify for that at all. At this point, I’m just a poser trying to keep up.

Well, and I’m only 33, so I didn’t realize I was old already.

Well, you know, but you’re within a slingshot’s distance of it, right? You’re like, just, you know, you’re all right.

I thought I was close, but apparently I’m not. Plus, you have kids in your class all day long, so you’re closer than we are.

All I have is Martha. She doesn’t act like a child very often.

Yeah, I’m not beast. You two are beast, I’m not.

Neither am I. But I also work at a high school, and I hadn’t heard it there.

Oh, really? I hear it with the younger kids, the fifth and sixth graders, and I haven’t been hearing it at the high school.

All right, let’s see if we can do this with some simplicity. I know that this term exists among college students. There are some collections of slang, including some from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, that have included this term beast to mean to do well on a test, like I beasted that exam, for about six or seven years.

And I know that I can find uses of it on the internet in very much the same way, probably 10 or 15 years earlier than that. It’s always hard with slang. It’s hard to search for this stuff.

And what’s really interesting is that it looks like this might have come out of sports. For example, if you’re on the basketball court and you’re just driving really hard with no finesse whatsoever, you might be said to be beasting your way down the court. You beasted the ball into the hoop, right? It’s like doing it like an animal.

Like, absolutely. It’s without, like, any of the kind of refinements that you would expect from, like, a seasoned player. And this is so interesting because you see something similar in Spanish. Que bestia. What a beast. Or he played, like, a bestia peluda, a hairy beast.

And so you’ll find a lot of people using beast as a verb in school talking about their work. Like, I beasted my way through that paper, meaning originally it kind of meant I just tore my way through it and did, like, a single draft and turned it in. And then it modified just a little bit to mean not that I did it without refinement, without any kind of real concentration, but that I did it well.

And so there’s a little bit of a transition there.

And now it’s more of an adjective?

Yeah, the adjective has kind of existed for a while. I would call it kind of a surface noise on slang because it’s really vague. There are so many terms in slang that mean good or great or cool. And it’s existed. I can find numerous examples of it. But it’s never been that popular.

It’s never really risen to the fore and been like, it’s not like a wicked, you know, that kind of like has a place and a time where you can say wicked belong to these people in this era. Beast has just kind of been floating out there for several decades without kind of much attention being paid to it.

But your kids, keep an ear out because that’ll keep you young, I promise.

Yeah, call us with more.

Thank you, I will. I enjoy your show very much.

Elaine, you have an advantage the rest of us don’t have. You get to change young minds at the same time you learn from them.

Well, I’m a speech therapist, so hopefully I can teach them some new words, too.

Oh, doubly great. Well, thank you for your work.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

You, too.

What slang are you hearing? We want to talk with you about us. You can email us at words@waywordradio.org or call us right now, 877-929-9673.