I have had a lot of feedback from last weeks, ‘Thirteen Speak’ column. If you missed it, it was the handy guide to communicating with that thing that lives in the bedroom that smells like an inner city farm.
If you have a thirteen year old, you will already know what I mean. If your’s is approaching that age, I intend to set up a help line.
A lot of you wrote in with phrases and sayings and indeed ‘noises’ for me to translate. I may not be able to get back to all of you so here’s a summary.
‘Many of you enquired about ‘IN IT!’ A funny little noise made in the back of the nose. This is often scattered through sentences such as when you have just hovered over the phone charger cable left in the middle of the bedroom floor. Don’t worry about losing the charger up the hover piper, ‘thirteen’ has already lost the phone that went with but hasn’t told you yet. But the ‘in it’ may well appear such as……… ‘That’s your fault….init!’ The lost phone may also be your fault ‘in it.’
Banging! Several worried letters arrive about this word. Let me assure Ray of Ernesettle, banging means that the offspring is favourably impressed with something and not what you thought!
Put the two utterances together and you can get ‘Banging Init’ which translated means, ‘I am really most impressed with this situation!’ Rarely heard if parents are around!
‘Mmuuhno!’ This is a tricky one. I heard this only last week when I asked where ‘thirteen’s’ homework was. It could mean I don’t know. It may also mean ‘I don’t have any’ or as he lost it on Friday somewhere bewtween the bus stop and the microwave. ‘I don’t have nun,’ has also been the answer in the past, from which you can work out that he he might some but certaily no English homework.
Thirteen speak is difficult to understand but the Thirteen Dress Code is completely unintelligible. Uniforms are not cool. Thirteen will have a total disregard for uniform. It may leave the house highly polished but return looking like it has been hosed out of a china clay pit. The tie must be worn with the knot the same size as a Mother Pride bap. Never do the top shirt buttons up. That’s not cool… ‘in it.’ Jumpers must have at least three arm holes and never return home twice in a week with your own jumper. Rooting through the lost property bin is good exercise for ‘thirteen’ and can be an Aladdin’s Cave of wear and share clothing. Trousers must be worm off the buttock, making them just long enough to fray the leg end. The Robinson Crusoe look is in this season…. ‘in it.’
Yes, uniform is not the thing for a thirteen year old, until they are in town on a Saturday when whole herds of them can be seen sweeping up Royal Parade with standard blue and white Fred Perry shirts, baggy jeans, identical, pumped up platform trainers and gelled hair. It’s like passing an army of tennis playing, undernourished, formation hedgehogs.
Next week
My theories on whether thirteen will ever see fourteen…in it!
Fitz
