Listening to them out on the verandah, using their new words, they sound like we did all those years ago. Maybe that's how dialect happens, how when folks didn't travel so much we all sounded so different. It had a bonding effect though, a sort of linguistical marker of groups and friends. Maybe that's why I never tried to decode their slang, kinda seemed rude, as if I was listening to someone else's phone call. They would grin at those new words too, adopt a way of talking, new body language. They went from kids who were flung together by God and fate... to something akin to family. People called them gangs, but they see the wrong thing, prejudice does that. I saw kids who never knew what we called "family" decades ago, brought up by a system that never loved them, finding peace in one another. That's what nature does, it seeks a way to function out of nothing, like green foliage on desert dunes. So this slang, it's both healthy for them and its a symptom of the stuff we did wrong. The solution is to love them, be family to them, it always was.