Skibidi All Day Long

My Daughter Teaches Me A Thing Or Two

Little Bean is in stitches laughing over the word I just said out loud. The word is skibidi. I have no idea what it means.

We’re playing a game called “Slang Words My Daughter Taught Me.” There’s ten of them. I know four. That’s it. She knows more though.

“Why is that word funny,” I ask.

“Well,” she begins, still giggling, “there’s this YouTube thing called Skibidi Toilet, where there’s these toilets going around chasing people with heads and big teeth coming out of the toilets.”

I just stare at her.

“Really daddy, it’s a thing. It’s super popular.”

“So the word means toilet head?”

“No, the word means bad.”

“What about the toilet head?”

“Toilet heads are bad, daddy.”

I admit, she has me there.

“Do you watch this?”

“No, it’s stupid, all the boys watch it though.”

After our test, I looked it up and well, my advice would be for you not to Google Skibidi Toilet. It’s actually a little bit shocking how popular it is.

The word itself, incidentally, is not strictly associated only with the toilet or ‘bad.’ In many definitions, the word is a simple nonsense word that can absorb contextual meaning, like a wild card. Do you like Taylor Swift? Tell your friend that her music is skibidi. Or makes you feel skibidi. Or that you want to skibidi to her music. Don’t like Taylor Swift? Tell your friend she makes you feel like skibiding in the toilet.

Anyway, of the ten words above, I knew Delulu, GOAT, SUS and Pookie. She knew Skibidi, Rizz, Cap, GOAT, Pookie and SUS. She also knew Gyat, which led to another round of laughter.

“It’s somebody’s butt daddy!”

I looked that one up as well by the way, and find the usage interesting. It’s generally not used as a noun, so you wouldn’t use the word gyat in place of butt. You wouldn’t say “He had a big gyat.” Instead you’d use the word as an exclamation rather than an adjective. So, you wouldn’t say “He has a gyat butt.”

You’d simply exclaim “Gyat!” and everybody would know you’re talking about somebodies butt.

Language is like that, there’s meaning twists and turns and each generation develops their own code.

“Cool, kid-o,” I say, “this was very sigma!”

She just shakes her head. “Don’t be SUS daddy.

Apropos of nothing, this is a screen grab from the music video Skibidi by the German rave group Little Big. I also woudn’t recommend you checking them out. They are, uh, unique.

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Upcoming: Stay tuned dear reader, it’s going to be a busy week. Tomorrow, we have a special essay about the upcoming holidays. Wednesday and maybe Thursday we’ll have some reflections on our big The Warning concert with some video. I want to write a bit about my library’s recent Duck Race Day activities and someplace this week I’ll have some thoughts about our end of year neighborhood water balloon shenanigans. Thanks for being here!

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