Representative Image of a school classroom.
Credit: iStock Photo
It is that time of year again –admissions season and college seats are vanishing faster than Coldplay concert tickets. Amid a busy session, I was assigned document verification. One particularly sprightly GenZ student approached me with visible nerves and said, “My friend Neha Samantha texted – they’re stuck in traffic”.
I blinked. Shouldn’t it be – Neha and Samantha are stuck in traffic? My inner Grammar Nazi winced. Conjunction error and subject-verb violation! “Kids these days!” I muttered to myself while maintaining a benevolent adult-on-duty smile.
Trying to keep things moving, I asked, “How much time will she take to get here? We can’t wait too long”.
“Err..honestly IDK why, but I texted them and they have seen-zoned me, but probably they should be here like in five minutes,” she said.
Seen-zoned? I stared blankly! “Ah, alright” I said, while my brain screamed for help, “What in the world is this expression?” I noted sagely like I
totally knew what that meant. When it comes to keeping with changing times and language, the expectations from English teachers are always sky
high. I was clearly out of my vocabulary depth!
Amidst bemused parents and nervous wards, a panting student burst into the classroom, clutching her bag and breath for dear life! “Neha Samantha here!” she announced triumphantly.
I turned to the helpful friend and asked, “Is she the one you asked me to wait for?” The student straightened up, clearly channelling all the Instagram boomerang energy and confidence in the world. “Ma’am, with all due respect,” she said, “Neha Samantha identifies as they/them.” NS chimed in duly, “It will be really great if you could either use gender neutral pronouns or remember my pronoun”.
That was a light-bulb moment! I put two and two together and made sense of it all. It was me and my grammatical slip! Suddenly, the grammar errors weren’t errors at all. Age seemed to catch up with the realisation that I had GenZ grammar to catch up with!
Later that evening, curiosity got the better of me, and I looked up seen-zoned. Apparently, it means when someone reads your message but doesn’t reply. A grievous offence in the GenZ world. Practically emotional manslaughter.
So, in just one day I learned: They/them is a pronoun to be taken seriously. Seen-zoning is a social faux pas.
Grammar isn’t dying, it is evolving into something my schools didn’t prepare me for.
I guess I have a lot of catching up to do before I go on mentally correcting everyone’s grammar errors. In the meantime, I’ll just be here, sipping on my herbal tea and updating my mental dictionary so the Grammar Nazi in me doesn’t get worked up, and hoping that I never get seen-zoned by the GenZ batch of students I would be teaching in the new academic year.