Teenager's Slang Deemed 'Linguistically Valid' by Furious Grandfather

Retired English professor Dr. Walter Proper, 74, has been forced to concede that his 16-year-old granddaughter's slang vocabulary is 'linguistically valid by every criterion I've spent fifty years teaching,' a realization he described as 'the worst day of my professional life.' The admission came after Dr. Proper's granddaughter, Zoe, used the word 'slay' as a general term of approval at dinner, prompting Dr. Proper to deliver a twenty-minute lecture on the degradation of the English language. 'Slay means to kill,' Dr. Proper said. 'It does not mean to perform well or to look attractive. This is linguistic decay.' 'Actually, Grandpa,' Zoe replied, 'semantic shift is a well-documented process in historical linguistics. You taught that. I read your book.' Dr. Proper, whose 1998 textbook 'Language in Motion: The Dynamics of English Change' devotes an entire chapter to semantic broadening and narrowing, was reportedly silent for a long time. 'She's right,' he later conceded to his wife, in their kitchen, with the demeanor of a man who has been undone by his own curriculum. 'Slay has undergone semantic broadening. So has cap, so has bet, so has fire. They all follow the same patterns I describe in chapter seven. I cannot argue against my own book.' Dr. Proper's wife noted that he had been 'unusually quiet for several days' following the exchange. 'He went into his study and re-read chapter seven,' she said. 'Then he came out and said, I'm not wrong, but I'm not right, and I need to think about what that means.' Zoe, for her part, has begun citing Dr. Proper's textbook in response to all future linguistic objections. 'Chapter four covers slang as a driver of innovation,' she said. 'He literally wrote the book on why I'm allowed to talk like this.' Dr. Proper has not yet formulated a response. 'I may need to write a second edition,' he said. 'With a new chapter titled: When Your Own Scholarship Betrays You.'