Geneva, October 2020, Phil Smith
When you live away from your own country you can miss how the language changes, which means that you still speak as you did ten years ago. I am from the UK (a former European country east of Ireland) and have spent nearly eleven years in Geneva, and during that time the language has changed with new slang entering the fray, and this has left some of my cherished go-to expressions hopelessly out of date. Does this sound familiar, do you raise eyebrows in the watering holes of Madrid or Berlin? By way of example, to say something is good my grandson calls it « sick », while I’m still stuck in a 1980s time-warp of calling good things « wicked ». So archaic.
This is what happened. One of my daughters is a real film buff and can always suggest good flicks to watch and books to read – perhaps a bit heavy on the rom-coms, but usually a decent way to while away the hours of lockdown. Not long ago I was in a card shop and saw one that I thought suited her down to the ground, because it spoke to her love of curling up with a nice glass of wine to watch a film.
Although I pride myself on being down with the kids, I simply took this card at face value, seeing it as representing a pleasant yet wholesome evening at home. Imagine my surprise when three days after sending it, my normally well-grounded daughter was on the phone to me shouting, « Have you gone mad?! ». I was puzzled, which made my daughter laugh even harder. She promptly forwarded a picture of the card to her sister and brothers (known collectively and affectionately as the chromosomes) and to her many friends in all parts of London.
I went to look up the term and discovered it is slang, or rather a euphemism, for sex. If my information is correct, it started when girls warned other girls that if a boy suggested you could get together for ‘Netflix and chill’, it would involve more commitment than just providing popcorn.
I didn’t know any of this. I have spent recent years intrepidly investigating the words needed to describe cheese chiselling and the joys of midwifery. This just never came up.
The plot thickens though, because I bought the card with my 34-year-old son and he even signed it with me. He has lived in Paris for ten years and is married to the lovely Camille, so perhaps could be forgiven for not knowing the expression, but the strange thing is that his French wife did. My son and daughter in UK did, but my very clued-up daughter-in-law in Birmingham didn’t, so I felt a little better. Well for a bit, until the daughter who had got the card phoned back to tell me another 50 friends thought it was hilarious. She was not going to let me slip under the radar on this one.
Research into the expression has produced inconclusive results, for example I watched a vox-pop on the very subject with New York twenty and thirty somethings, and not all of them got it. Sounds to me like a code known to the initiated, akin to a secret handshake.
Please bear all of this in mind next time you extend an invitation to binge watch at your place. In the meantime, my daughter has calmed down, although I have agreed to go halves on her therapy. It seems only fair.