Slang has rules the dictionary never mentions.

Cap shows up far more often as no cap – a way of underlining that you mean something, the same job “I swear” used to do. Calling a specific claim cap, on its own, is a real accusation, and a blunter one than most people reach for.

Non-native speakers often meet the denial form first, tacked onto the end of a sentence, and mistake it for filler. It isn’t. Save the accusation for someone you know well enough to call a liar and have it land as banter.

Sus is older than the internet: British police used it as shorthand for suspicious by the 1930s. Among Us gave it a global second life in 2020, when strangers in a lobby needed one word for “I don’t trust you, but I can’t prove it.”

The word works because it’s low-stakes and half-joking. Say it about something you’re genuinely accusing someone of – a missing wallet, a broken promise – and the joke stops covering the sentence; the casualness reads as not taking your own claim seriously.

Mid gets its sting from being calmer than bad. Bad at least implies someone felt something; mid says the thing didn’t register enough to be worth a real opinion.

It lands hardest on effort someone was proud of. Use it on a stranger’s takeout order and it’s harmless. Use it on a friend’s project and you’ve said, politely, that it wasn’t memorable – often a worse thing to hear than that it was wrong.

Gaslighting names something specific: sustained, deliberate doubt-planting, borrowed from a 1938 play about a husband who dims the lights and denies it. Lookups on Merriam-Webster’s own site rose more than 1,700 percent in 2022, the year it took the word-of-the-year title, and the meaning loosened as the use widened.

It now gets aimed at anyone who’s merely wrong, or spinning, in an argument.

A word can survive getting looser. It rarely survives being aimed at the wrong size of problem.

Rizz is a shortened charisma, unusually clipped from the middle of the word rather than the front or back. The streamer Kai Cenat is generally credited with popularizing it around 2022, a year before Oxford crowned it word of the year.

It’s handed out almost entirely as an observation about someone else. Claim it for yourself and the sentence undercuts its own point – the joke about “unspoken rizz” exists because the person announcing it usually isn’t the one who has it.

The ick describes a reaction rather than a decision – attraction switching off, usually over something small and involuntary. Once someone says it out loud, most groups treat the case as closed, no appeal.

It’s built to be shared behind someone’s back, not delivered to their face. Say it to the person who gave you the ick and you’ve turned an offhand feeling into a verdict they can’t argue with.

Some slang is safer when you turn it on yourself.

Telling someone to touch grass says their stakes exist only online, and are therefore not real stakes – advice with the contempt left in. It works between people already needling each other.

From a stranger, or mid-argument about something that matters to the other person offline, it reads as dismissive rather than teasing. You’ve told them their feelings don’t count, which is a bigger thing to say than you’re too online.

A glow-up is change built to be noticed – the before-and-after isn’t incidental to the word, it’s most of the point. It’s said with admiration, and usually about looks first.

Say it about someone who never asked to be compared to an earlier photo, and the compliment carries a quiet implication about the earlier version – kind about now, a little unkind about then.

A dupe is the cheaper stand-in you found on purpose, and finding it is the whole point. People post dupes the way they’d post a good deal, not an admission that they couldn’t afford the original.

Bring up the original in the same breath and you’ve spoiled the bit. The pleasure of a dupe is that the comparison doesn’t need saying.

The phrase existed before December 2022, but one New York Magazine cover story that month – mapping Hollywood’s family trees in a single issue – is what sent it everywhere. Some people wear it. Some get hit with it.

Aimed at someone who’s never claimed credit they didn’t earn, it stops being commentary on an industry and starts being a punishment for their parents. The word doesn’t draw that line; the speaker has to.

The phrase comes directly from the film, where a canon event is a supposedly fixed moment in every Spider-person’s story – often a loss or another major turning point. Online it became a way to reframe your own bad luck as scripted rather than personal.

It works for stubbed toes and missed trains. Apply it to someone else’s actual loss and it can sound like you’re filing their grief under plot device instead of sitting with it.

Delulu shortens delusional into something you can say about your own hopes without the clinical weight of the original – it made the Macquarie Dictionary’s word-of-the-year short list in Australia in 2023, though cozzie livs won that year.

Delulu can be self-directed – “my delulu era” – or aimed at a friend whose hopes have outrun the evidence. The self-directed version keeps it playful; aimed at someone else’s serious plans, it can sound less like a joke and more like a diagnosis.

After red flags and green flags claimed every serious signal, beige flag arrived for the traits that are neither – the alphabetized spice rack, the strong opinions about sandwich order. It’s affectionate by default.

It stops being funny when it’s used to downgrade something that’s actually a real concern. Calling a genuine red flag beige is a way of talking yourself out of the conversation, not a quirky observation.

The term isn’t new. Sociologists coined it in 1956 to describe how television audiences formed one-sided bonds with people on screen. It only entered the Cambridge Dictionary in 2023, and topped its word-of-the-year list in 2025, as those bonds moved from anchors to streamers, influencers, and chatbots.

Online, parasocial can be a self-aware joke about a podcast host or streamer, but it is also used critically about someone else’s attachment. In either direction, it names a one-sided connection – not simply liking a public figure.