Chunc, Chopped, and Completely Lost

By Chenayde Abrahams

I am, ashamedly, what people call a zillennial. Despite being born in 1998 and officially classifying as Gen Z, I have been ousted from their club into the ‘almost millennial’ one. I push back against this, because I do not seem to like the same things most millennials do, like skinny jeans and Facebook. But my attempt to be embraced by younger Gen Zs is always struck down by one thing: I do not understand their lingo.

I know the basics – ‘it’s giving’, ‘ate that up’, and ‘clock it’, to name but a few – but I find myself at a loss when I am with the "youngin's" who boldly call people ‘chunc’ and ‘chopped.’ If I, born in 1998 (which seems like just a few years ago), cannot keep up, I cannot imagine the stress that actual millennials and all their predecessors feel when strolling on the ‘gram. (Gen Z enough?)

Stick with me, then, if you find yourself lost in the terms that define our digital lives and would like a quick tutorial from someone who has done considerable research in order to pass as a genuine member of the generation she was technically born into.

Cracking the Code

Let us start with the simple ones. ‘It’s giving’ describes the specific vibe, energy, or aesthetic that someone or something projects. If I showed up to an event in a short pink skirt with a matching crop top, someone could say: ‘It’s giving Britney Spears.’ Similarly, ‘ate that up’ (or simply ‘ate’) means someone absolutely nailed something – flawlessly executed, no crumbs left behind. Think of it as the highest possible compliment. If your friend delivers a killer presentation at work, she ate. If you correctly read your boss’s energy and sum it up for the team, you ate with that. ‘Clock it’, meanwhile, means to notice or call something out, usually something others might have missed. ‘Did you clock his tone of voice with me?’ Yes. Clocked.

Chopped and Chunc

Now to the terms that left me utterly stumped. I do some work for a university that sends students to South Africa on a study abroad programme. When I asked what they thought of the place, one of them mentioned being shocked at the number of ‘chopped’ people on campus. With no idea what they meant, I smiled and nodded. ‘Chopped’, I have come to learn, refers to something or someone that is ugly, subpar, or simply not it. If a meal disappoints, it is chopped. If a date goes badly, they were chopped. ‘Chopped’ also revealed to me that the work Christina Aguilera did for us with ‘Beautiful’ simply did not land for this generation. They also brazenly refer to people as ‘chunc’, an unfortunate portmanteau of ‘chopped’ and ‘unc’ (short for uncle), essentially saying that we are both ugly and old.

Enter Looksmaxxing

Fortunately for us, there is apparently a way to escape our tragic chunc-ness. Enter looksmaxxing. What I once assumed was a term about simply looking your best turned out to be something considerably darker. Looksmaxxing refers to an online subculture focused on maximising physical attractiveness, ranging from relatively safe ‘softmaxing’ (skincare, fitness) to dangerous ‘hardmaxing’ (cosmetic surgery and, yes, bone-smashing), all in pursuit of extreme beauty standards. The term is believed to have emerged from the incel community. ‘Incel’ is short for involuntary celibate. Though originating in the late 1990s as a loose support group, the term has since come to describe people who subscribe to a toxic, extremist ideology associated with misogynist terrorism, harassment, and violence. By the early 2010s, these men had turned romantic failure into a kind of pseudoscience, ranking attractiveness through Eurocentric, chauvinistic checklists: jawlines, chin widths, the precise angle of one’s eyes.

Who Made These Words?

It is easy, and quite fun, to treat these terms as a purely generational curiosity, a puzzle to decode before the next batch renders it obsolete. But some of the most playful-feeling words carry meaningful histories. ‘Ate’ and ‘clock it’, for instance, were born in the ballrooms of New York, created by Black and LGBTQ+ communities as a language of survival, solidarity, and self-expression. When those terms eventually made it onto the tongues of mainstream content creators and into corporate marketing campaigns, the communities who created them were rarely the ones who benefited. Language has a way of travelling upward; credit, as a rule, does not.

The darker entries in this glossary ask something more of us. Looksmaxxing and the incel ideology that spawned it are not simply colourful corners of the internet. They are the vocabulary of a belief system, one that hierarchises human worth, reduces people to physical measurements, and has, in documented cases, preceded real violence. When the language of extremist subcultures becomes everyday slang, the worldview underneath can quietly hitch a ride. Many of the terms we have picked up from Gen Z, and that we now use casually as though neutral, are not. They carry assumptions about who counts, what constitutes attractiveness, and histories that deserve our attention and recognition. Before we absorb a new word into our lexicon, it is worth pausing to ask: where did this come from, who does it serve, and what does it ask us to believe?

I know that asking you to do all this work before using any new term makes me kind of delulu. But if you have gotten to the end of this and haven’t at least had your interest piqued, that is lowkey kinda sus. No cap.

Chenayde Abrahams is an intern at the Campaign On Digital Ethics