The Out-of-Touch Adults' Guide to Kid Culture: What Does 'Pushing P' Mean?

This week, all the kids are breathlessly following corporate acquisition news and making one another sign non-disclosure agreements. It’s all very adult.

New slang alert: What does “pushing P” mean?

According to my son, all the young people are talking about P. Specifically “pushing P,” a phrase that means something like “promoting something good and cool.”

The widespread use of the slang comes from rapper Gunna, whose single “Pushin P” is crammed with awesome, alliterative lyrics like, “She not a lesbian, for P, she turn Pesbian.”

According to Gunnar’s twitter, “putting your people in position is P,” as is “bossing your bitch up,” “risking your life to feed your family,” and “being a real n***a off the internet.” On the other hand, “speaking on a n***a for no reason,” “jumping in a person’s beef or situation when you dk what’s going on” and “Alex” are not P. (I don’t know what Alex did.)

The phrase is catching on enough that IHOP’s Twitter feed proudly proclaims the restaurant chain is “always pushing P(ancakes)” and Nike says that it had an internal meeting and determined it is will be pushing P all year.

Microsoft is buying Activision Blizzard

The gaming world is abuzz over Microsoft’s imminent purchase of Activision Blizzard. Should the deal go through, Microsoft will pay $75 billion for the game company that brought us Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, and 1982’s’s Pitfall. According to The Wall Street Journal, Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick is expected to step down from his leadership role at the troubled game company.

You wouldn’t think that news of corporate acquisitions would interest kids, but gamers are a special sort, and they love business news from the game world. Message boards and podcasts are full of takes on the meaning of the merger, and while they’re often hilariously wrong, I like that gamers at least pay attention to the games behind their games.

Is making your friends sign an NDA the new trend?

In a gone-viral video, TikTok user Breezyqbaby details her interesting strategy for making sure her secrets aren’t revealed: She has her friends sign NDAs. Breezy reports that she “spilled a lot of tea” at dinner, necessitating the non-disclosure agreements. As you’d expect, TikTok’s commenters had mixed feelings. Some think this is a great idea. Other responded like itsdynah who posted “Who needs an NDA when you have a frieNDA?” That’s very good, itsdynah.

Trend overview: What are “garbage trends?”

Vox’s tech writer Rebecca Jenning’s recent article “The Year of Garbage Internet Trends” took a look back at 2021 and tried to make sense of the great sea of memes, trendlets, and hype that defined the year in popular culture. She coined the phrase “garbage trends” to cover things like the Sea Shanty revival, Dogecoin, “Cheugy” and (presumably) saying “Pushing P.” Her article reveals something important and troubling about the inner lives of kids. These trends burn through the whole country and maybe the world in days and even hours. They’re relentless pushed by profiteers, and our mental real estate is taken up with disposable nonsense instead of—I’m not sure what would be there instead. While there have always been dumb kid-trends that spread quickly and were just as quickly forgotten, before the Internet (or whatever all this is), they were usually localized to your high school—like that week when everyone suddenly decided it was cool to go that weird diner on the interstate. What will become of kids immersed in meaningless junk 24/7? I guess we’ll find out soon enough!

Viral video of the week: The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power—Title Announcement

The title announcement video (because that’s a thing now) for Prime Video’s upcoming Lord of the Rings prequel series does what it promises and little else: It lets us all know that the name of the series is The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. It’s only been up for a couple days and has already gone viral to the tune of over 3 million views, so I’d say there’s a lot of interest in this series.

The show is set thousands of years before the Lord of the Rings movies, and will tell stories about the 20 rings of power from the books. The writer/producers in charge, J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay (who wrote the Jungle Cruise movie) put out a statement that reads, in part, “We feel like Frodo, setting out from the Shire, with a great responsibility in our care—it is the beginning of the adventure of a lifetime.” With that team powering the project, I’m sure J.R.R. Tolkien’s corpse is dancing for joy, not spinning in its grave.