In Reply to: Totally OT: kids these days drop the article posted by TheHappyBurgermeister on August 21, 2026 at 08:06:42
This is so cool. So they're taking the mass noun quality of the word "beef" in its regular use (I checked with my wife just to be sure: You can't have a beef or two beefs on your plate as you would have a meatball or two meatballs) and transferring it to the use of the word to stand for "complaint".
They're applying the most common form of language change: they're regularizing it. Nice move, kids.
And Blu, I don't know if you're being sarcastic, but if not, don't blame yourself. This kind of change in languages is like a glacier flowing its course. It's slow, it's subtle, it usually takes place across generation boundaries, but it just can't be stopped.