Teens have always had unique ways of communicating with each other — just think of the slang terms that used to baffle your parents! However, with today’s teens absorbed in their smartphones, the codes they use to lay low are getting more elaborate and harder for parents to decipher. Here’s a guide to 40 emojis and teen texting codes parents should be aware of.
1. Avocado
No, it doesn’t mean, “You’re delicious! Especially on a salty chip!”
The avocado emoji is a way to ridicule people who are “basic.” Basic people are only interested in trivial and trendy things. They have no original thoughts of their own.
2. 121
While nowadays kids refer to the teen texting code as meaning “private chat,” the origin is much simpler: one-to-one. As in, let’s have a one-to-one conversation. This is considered “leetspeak,” or “leet” for short. It’s where a person replaces letters with numbers or other characters to form words phonetically.
3. Silent Face
Used to intimidate, this is a way of saying, “Keep your mouth shut.” After all, if you have no mouth, you can’t speak.
4. 9, CD9, Code 9
Code 9 or its shorthand versions — CD9 or just 9 — all mean the same thing: “parents are here” or “parents are around.” This is a signal to keep the conversation “clean.”
5. 99
Code 99 means parents are gone or no longer watching what’s being typed. It could mean nothing, but if the kid wasn’t doing something inappropriate, why would they need to tell the other person that their parents were away?