Cool, kids, I'm down with that...

I saw a disturbing report on the local news.  The story was one of those scare pieces that tend to show up every weekend.  It was a breathless warning to parents that apparently, the youth of today are not only spending too much time in Internet chat rooms but they're using those chat rooms to engage in coded talk about sex and drugs.

Especially drugs.

This was not the disturbing part.  People -- young or not -- always tend to spend more time talking about drugs and sex than doing either. 

The disturbing part was that the story came along with a helpful key to understanding this so-called "code" that teenagers are supposedly using on the Internet.  In other words, the story came with a slang dictionary.

I read each piece of slang and I listened as the newscaster solemnly explained what each term meant.

Quickly, I realized that all of this lingo was completely and totally foreign to me.

Not only had I never heard any of these words before but I couldn't even begin to guess what the root of these terms were.  I had no idea how this new slang originated.

To my ears, this new teen slang might as well have been Esperanto.

At that moment, I understood the terrible truth.  I understood that if I, at this moment, attempted to speak to a bunch of teenagers, I would come across as the type of out-of-touch, old guy that my friends and I always used to smirk at whenever we heard him describe something as being "groovy" or "far out."

I had visions of myself saying, "I'm down with that" while a bunch of long-haired, Internet-addicted teens laughed at me behind my back.

At that moment, I truly understood that, even if I'm not quite old, I'm definitely not young anymore.

For the first time, I not only knew I was thirty-three but I finally understood what that actually means.