You Can and Should Blame Young People When They Act Like Lazy Cheaters, Actually
Freddie deBoer
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You Can and Should Blame Young People When They Act Like Lazy Cheaters, Actually<br>fear of "old man yells at cloud" has become a culture-devouring virus
Freddie deBoer<br>Jun 03, 2026
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“this rocks actually” - Cool Professor<br>Recently a bunch of young people have been using the term “point of view” in a way that’s unhelpful. I say unhelpful rather than wrong because I have zero interest in jumping into the grammar wars, which aren't actually much of a war. Just about zero people out there are actually strict grammarians, and the collective essaying world has taken sides against “grammar Nazis” at a scale of at least 1000 to 1, so it’s a war against almost no human enemy. You see that with this whole POV business; there’s ten billion essays and tweets and YouTube videos defending the practice and like one guy on the bus who hates it, but we have to pretend that he’s the hegemonic force or whatever. It’s weird stuff, but the impulse ultimately has a clear source: fear of looking old.<br>The deal is that much of Gen Z (and “Gen Alpha,” which is the dumbest generational name ever devised) uses “point of view,” or “POV,” to mean simply “look at this,” rather than “this image or video is shown from the point of view of X,” the traditional usage. Apparently it’s all over TikTok in particular - a video will be labeled “POV: an elephant,” and what you see is an elephant and not something seen from the perspective of an elephant. “POV: you rollerskated for the first time” but it’s just video of the TikTok user rollerskating rather than rollerskating from the perspective of the rollerskater. You get the idea. This usage is unhelpful and impractical, if you ask me, whether or not we want to call it incorrect! As is so often the case with imprecision in language, this behavior gets rid of a very useful construction and puts in its place something we already could say in many different ways. As with turning “literally” into an empty intensifier often applied to metaphorical use, the mass meta-sanctimony of the anti-grammarian set on this issue has left the English language weaker than it was and called it progressive. And now here the NYT trots out a linguist to tell you that you’re a reactionary for maybe preferring the more useful version.
preorder All In Your Head now<br>The whole world of anti-grammar cop cops is its own thing and, like so much else of what passes for progressive these days, is vastly larger and more influential and more powerful than the target it mislabels hegemonic. (“I don’t care who knows it or what it costs me… language pedantry is irritating!” Truly, profile in courage.) The Times piece suggest that people insisting on a correct usage of language may be engaged in an effort to enforce “social power,” despite the fact that the anti-grammarians won in an absolute rout decades ago and obviously have more social power. It’s not hard to find a linguist who comes down forcefully on the side of “everything goes” in language; indeed, almost all of them do, and the NYT employs one of them as a columnist. That this attitude amounts to telling other people how to use language by saying that you can’t tell other people how to use language is a simple point that remains undiscussed. (Remember friends: every descriptivism is meta-linguistically prescriptivist.) It’s remarkable how there’s no right way to use language, but the people who want to use it the traditional way are inevitably wrong! It’s all a will to power, all of it.<br>The deeper context here is the fact that the people using “POV” in a way almost tailor-made to obscure meaning and reduce comprehensibility are young, and the desire to avoid being the fogey criticizing young people has become a civilization-swallowing meme, a reflexive, terrified behavior driven by the deepest fear our culture possesses: the fear of looking old. The pieces defending using POV when meaning “look at this” or “literally” when meaning “intensely” or “ironically” when meaning, fuck, who knows at this point, they sprout like mushrooms in cowshit because of the fear of aging, the fear of being owned, the fear of “old man yells at cloud.” Desperate to avoid looking like the wrong kind of old person, aging writers and journos and commentators look for excuse after excuse for bad behavior by the young. And there’s no better example than the absolutely dogged refusal to judge young students for cheating with LLMs.
There’s a particular sound a room full of educated adults makes when a young person does something wrong; you’ve heard it many times before and so have I. It’s the sound of a roomful of tightened throats clearing in unison, preparing to explain that it isn’t really the young person’s fault. Consider this remarkable document from The New Yorker. In it, a bunch of career college educators lament the rise of AI cheating in higher education,...