These days, TikTok is buzzing with a strange trend. Many businesses and brands are making their Gen Z staff write marketing scripts, and asking senior workers to impassively repeat them. In the latest take on the trend, Northumberland Zoo's (@northumberlandzoo) marketing script went viral after Gen Z took over the responsibility of writing it. As two elderly workers narrated the "Gen-Z style" script with poker faces, paired with perfect comic timing, the duo made people on social media laugh out loud.
“Northumberland Zoo hits different,” speaks an elderly male employee, standing at the zoo entrance with a female colleague, both dressed in zoo uniforms. “It’s poppin',” he says, standing in front of a fence. The clip transitions to a bat's cage, pointing at which the employee says, “Bat.” The woman interrupts him and says, “No I think, it’s a brat.” “Brat,” the man again introduces the animal. In Gen Z slang, “brat” is often used to describe someone bold, blunt, authentic, and confident.
However, it seems pretty obvious that the two employees have no idea what they’re saying and are just carrying out the script. This adds a humorous angle to the marketing clip. The clip then shows the two employees standing with a brown donkey. “Slay,” the woman speaks. “Slay,” in Gen Z vocabulary, means “to do something well or to do a good job.”
Next comes an owl in the picture which the woman describes as the “Main character energy.” The owl flutters away. The phrase "Main character energy" refers to confidence, charisma, and self-assuredness, often associated with the main character in a story or movie. On social media, it is used to describe someone who wants to be the center of attention.
Representative Image Source: Pexels | Amoil Mande
“Queen,” the man declares snapping his fingers as a cute milky brown pony stands beside him. A smattering of poop was referred to as “ick!” Next, the zookeepers introduced lemurs again with the word “Slay.” The clip transitions to a tree-clad walkway where both the employees are walking. “If you have a Menty B,” says the man, adding, “Riverwalk.” Menty B is a nickname for “mental breakdown.”
They go on to introduce a goat with the slang “G.O.A.T.” which implies “Greatest Of All Time,” and another place that they say, “gives an Amazon rainforest.” “Lit,” the woman utters. According to Claire Madden, “Lit” in Gen Z lingo describes things that are “really awesome, really cool.” Next up in the video, they introduce a cute raccoon, who seems to be nibbling on food, looking at which the team says, “See how he is eating. Very cutesy. Very mindful. Very demure.” “Very mindful, very demure” is a phrase that went viral after a TikTok user described her make-up for work, per The Times. The hilarious commercial concludes with the woman saying, “We’re armed for you to visit.”
Image Source: TikTok | @cutesntoots
Image Source: TikTok | @google
In just two days, the video racked up over 2.8 million views and over 3,000 comments. “This has got to be one of the best ones out there,” said @bayleighthebordercollie. @monkeyandmoo1804 commented about the “demure” lemur writing, “The lemur was a paid actor for sure!” The post even received a roll-into-laughter comment from Google.
You can follow Northumberland Zoo on TikTok to catch more sneak peeks into how they take care of animals.
Ladder leads out of darkness.Photo credit 
Woman's reflection in shadow.Photo credit 
Young woman frazzled.Photo credit 
Will your current friends still be with you after seven years?
Professor shares how many years a friendship must last before it'll become lifelong
Think of your best friend. How long have you known them? Growing up, children make friends and say they’ll be best friends forever. That’s where “BFF” came from, for crying out loud. But is the concept of the lifelong friend real? If so, how many years of friendship will have to bloom before a friendship goes the distance? Well, a Dutch study may have the answer to that last question.
Sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst and his team in the Netherlands did extensive research on friendships and made some interesting findings in his surveys and studies. Mollenhorst found that over half of your friendships will “shed” within seven years. However, the relationships that go past the seven-year mark tend to last. This led to the prevailing theory that most friendships lasting more than seven years would endure throughout a person’s lifetime.
In Mollenhorst’s findings, lifelong friendships seem to come down to one thing: reciprocal effort. The primary reason so many friendships form and fade within seven-year cycles has much to do with a person’s ages and life stages. A lot of people lose touch with elementary and high school friends because so many leave home to attend college. Work friends change when someone gets promoted or finds a better job in a different state. Some friends get married and have children, reducing one-on-one time together, and thus a friendship fades. It’s easy to lose friends, but naturally harder to keep them when you’re no longer in proximity.
Some people on Reddit even wonder if lifelong friendships are actually real or just a romanticized thought nowadays. However, older commenters showed that lifelong friendship is still possible:
“I met my friend on the first day of kindergarten. Maybe not the very first day, but within the first week. We were texting each other stupid memes just yesterday. This year we’ll both celebrate our 58th birthdays.”
“My oldest friend and I met when she was just 5 and I was 9. Next-door neighbors. We're now both over 60 and still talk weekly and visit at least twice a year.”
“I’m 55. I’ve just spent a weekend with friends I met 24 and 32 years ago respectively. I’m also still in touch with my penpal in the States. I was 15 when we started writing to each other.”
“My friends (3 of them) go back to my college days in my 20’s that I still talk to a minimum of once a week. I'm in my early 60s now.”
“We ebb and flow. Sometimes many years will pass as we go through different things and phases. Nobody gets buttsore if we aren’t in touch all the time. In our 50s we don’t try and argue or be petty like we did before. But I love them. I don’t need a weekly lunch to know that. I could make a call right now if I needed something. Same with them.”
Maintaining a friendship for life is never guaranteed, but there are ways, psychotherapists say, that can make a friendship last. It’s not easy, but for a friendship to last, both participants need to make room for patience and place greater weight on their similarities than on the differences that may develop over time. Along with that, it’s helpful to be tolerant of large distances and gaps of time between visits, too. It’s not easy, and it requires both people involved to be equally invested to keep the friendship alive and from becoming stagnant.
As tough as it sounds, it is still possible. You may be a fortunate person who can name several friends you’ve kept for over seven years or over seventy years. But if you’re not, every new friendship you make has the same chance and potential of being lifelong.