I’ve long been fascinated by the language used by my daughters (I was going to say “that my daughters use” but I’m afraid there’s meant to be an apostrophe in there somewhere and I just don’t know where). It’s really incredibly different to the way other (normal? old?) people speak. I was going to write a whole post about it but I’ve gradually come to realize it’s too big and unwieldy a topic.
I’ve tried looking things up on Urban Dictionary but it seems to me that no matter how innocuous your original word is, the explanation seems to descend into smut fairly quickly.
The first phrase is one I heard for the first time on Friday when I was driving my daughter to the airport. We were talking about politics (as you do when you’re really not very good at more personal conversations). I said that it would be a shame if Jacinda Ardern had to fall on her sword over this issue of the poor handling of internal complaints of bullying and sexual misconduct within the Labour Party, and my daughter replied that the phrase her friends would use would be “taking the L” – as in, taking the loss.
I wouldn’t suggest using the phrase “taking the D”. I suspect that is a whole different idea altogether.