New Generation Teens?

A few moments ago I was addressed as a "ret@rd" for not sending a gift on the Facebook game Restaurant City, by someone who is 4-5 years younger than me. For a fact he knows I am older than him and I have been his tutor during his summer school just a month ago.

I posted this on Facebook and one of the replies I got was

"they're the next generation. trust me. the world is getting americanized."

This gets me thinking - did it "legalize" teenagers nowadays to swear or be rude to people older than them? Recently there have been two cases in Hong Kong which shocked the public as a whole - the first one involved an 11-grader taking up two seats on a bus, claiming to have paid "twice" on the children price (note: the children price is only applicable to people below 12) and another involving a car directly stopping in front of a bus ready to stop by a bus stop but the car owner, instead, said that the bus driver and its passengers were the ones who were wrong, clearly without evidence.

Now the third case - a kid calling me a ret@rd. It just doesn't make sense.

Perhaps now I understand why the people who were on the bus and the passers-by said nowadays teens are un-educated.

Personally I am against this because I do not think that being disrespectful is a good thing to do, especially to people older than me. But why do some people just don't care?

Some say "post-80s/90s" (i.e. people born after 1980 and 1990 respectively) are rude nowadays - as a whole. But personally I think if we use rude words with people that are of a similar age or with friends, just for the fun of it, would not have as much impact as it would with people that are older than one - people that should be treated with respect.

Perhaps post-80s / 90s say too much in front of their friends and soon used them to curse other people, but they don't seem to see a problem with it. Of course I do think that most people still treat elders with respect, and that what I mentioned in just an iceberg in the sea, but this iceberg has to melt.

Another comment I got, from the same person mentioned above, was:

"it's all want. desires. me. everything is self-centred."


Pretty much that spoke for the rude group. I recall I was once someone who is self-centered, but even so I don't swear to other people (or the fact that I wasn't even taught to say it but even after I do, still don't say them... until Grade 7).


Another interpretation is that maybe they abuse the terms so much that it is not even treated as a swear word anymore. For example, recently I have been enjoying myself with "Big Brother" by CBS and words like a$$ or b!tch are still not censored (but others are still censored). Is that what "americanized" mean in the quote? People abuse words so much that they are not even treated as foul words anymore? That needs some rethinking.