Get a Load of That Square

Let's say you're running a business and you realize you can potentially attract the teenaged financial sector. What do you do?

You attempt to use current slang to suggest you keep a beat on current cultural practices. You see an epidemic of rock-and-roll singles hitting the Billboard Top 40 and everyone's referencing carefully-tailored lingo all around you. It may or may not matter if you're leery of what's popular in popular culture. What does matter is you find that teenagers are a lucrative source of profit and you need to convince them to buy your products - even if you aren't exactly 'with it.'

Whatever the aim may be, sometimes people screw the proverbial pooch and the target demographic realizes they aren't using slang properly.

This is the risk one plays with when attempting to sound Totally Radical. Plenty of shows, movies and games aimed at consumers 25 years or younger are developed by an older crowd, a crowd with a decidedly different childhood experience back in their days. This experience gives them, naturally, a very distinct reference pool for slang and popular culture, enough that it creates a lag between entertainment and reality. This isn't unexpected, as we tend to be our busiest prior to our 60s (or even 50s) and what sticks with us are those elements we found during our formative years.

This creates a disconnect between what a developer thinks and what is actually going on, whether it is happening on a conscious or subconscious level. As such, it bears mentioning: Popular culture tends to carry a lot of baggage and any outsider attempting to understand it generally won't grasp it entirely upon initial contact. This isn't to say s/he won't ever understand, of course, but merely that everyone previously unrelated to the phenomenon goes through a trial period where they necessarily won't know all the intricacies.

This means several things for a developer. Among them: first, while some slang becomes commonplace and even spoken to this day (how many times do people still say 'dude' well after its origins prior to the 20th century), new ones will always appear and are initially impenetrable to virgin ears. Second, cultures develop their own unique entertainment and developing unique twists on existing ones - to the point where any genre you might've known as a kid has blossomed to seemingly infinite variations. Third, people occasionally represent pop culture icons in a stage more primitive than their current state, thanks to several mitigating factors. Similarly, Popularity Polynomials can occur with or without warning, equally for well-known and obscure works.

Whatever the issues, the moral of the story is any given individual will be out of touch with modern popular culture for at least a brief period of time, when the Popularity Polynomial effect is against them especially. This isn't always bad - people can adapt and use cultural elements they aren't familiar with in creative and well-produced ways. However, it can cause a huge friction with others who may be fighting to remain relevant in an age when the Internet has gained impressive ground.

From a writer's perspective, this is a great way of illustrating how far a story has come if it's a particularly long-running series. As characters age and the timeline moves forward, the story will inevitably run into cultural evolution, assuming the author desires some realism in the narrative. Just as characters will experience culture shock when entering new environments, they can feel alienated by an old environment undergone various changes. Imagine how a hero might feel if he's returned home after a decade-long quest, only to find the kind of hero he represents isn't as popular as the dark, edgier, more Punisher-ier variant.

It's also a common comedy tool, wherein someone demonstrates how a character is out of place but is awkwardly trying to fit in. Parents in family shows may be victims of this, for example, as they try to be understanding of their offspring's interests. This can potentially lead to Author Tracts and Anvilicious stories, however, if the author is trying to paint one side as out-dated and, thus, irrelevant to modern sensibilities.