Matthew Burnette, Staff Writer

Maybe it’s just the cantankerous old man sitting in his rocking chair on the front porch yelling at the world that lives in the back of my head and makes himself known from time to time, but I really don’t understand or care for slang these days.

Every time I hear a “Let’s go!” or a young person respond to a statement with “no cap,” a begrudging shiver makes it way down my spine.

I think I may have even recently made the statement that “I don’t know why we ever stopped coming up with new words and phrases after ‘cowabunga.’”

With that being said, I am fully aware that a writer from a generation or two before me probably at some point expressed the same disdain for the popular words and phrases that my fellow millennials and I used in our youth.

Many a begrudging shiver were undoubtedly caused by the word “awesomesauce.”

Though the popularity of slang words and phrases ebbs and flows as generations develop their own unique ways of expressing themselves, there is a phrase that I think we let slip out of relevance a little too quickly.

Picture this scenario if you will:

You’re out in public running errands and in the distance, you see a friend of yours that you recently had a falling out with. You’ve been hoping to patch things up and bury the hatchet for a few days but didn’t want to be the one to initiate contact.

The friend spots you too and then you awkwardly start to make your way towards each other, both undoubtedly contemplating what you’re going to say. You reach talking distance and before they can speak you immediately begin apologizing and pouring your heart out.

After you’re done speaking there’s a pause of a few seconds as you’re left to wonder whether your apology was going to be accepted or denied.

Your friend starts to slowly open their mouth to respond as you eagerly anticipate what they are about to say.

“Ain’t no thing but a chicken wing.”

The rift is immediately mended you both go about your errands with a weight lifted off of your shoulders.

In and of itself, the phrase sounds incredibly ridiculous, but when you get to the heart of it and what it is trying to convey, I think it’s one that we should use a lot more often.

At least the sentiment it carries.

Anyone that’s been around a group of chickens knows that while their wings can temporarily get them out of a sticky situation and maybe even up into a tree, if need be, ultimately their wings are a useless part of their bodies, at least to them.

They’re unimportant, and until they’ve been deep fried and sauced, are of little value, so to say that something is merely a chicken wing, means that it’s not worth the weight you may be putting on it.

To understand that means you can move past it.

A lot of the time it feels like we don’t resolve even the smallest of riffs like we used to and don’t offer the reassurance that everything’s okay.

Instead, things get left to fester until they eventually snowball into hatred and nastiness, and then we focus on them until they start to become more and more prevalent in our lives.

They become important to how we function.

They become chicken legs.

We have to do a better job of letting things go, and then we have to do a better job of talking about the things that we can’t until we find ourselves in a place that we can, both to better live in peace with one another and, more importantly, to live in peace with ourselves.

I’d never be so naïve as to think that simply bringing back a dated phrase from a bygone era would solve all of the world’s problems and cause the world to suddenly live in peace and harmony.

But I do think that if we try a little harder to not let the smallest of issues or disagreements cause riffs between ourselves and others and let things go a little easier, then maybe it might make life a little easier.

Let’s try letting things be chicken wings again.