Don’t you just love it, Boomers, that sarcastic inflection in the voice of the young people who call you “boss”?

You’re at the store, perhaps the nursery, asking the young man whether that shipment of tarragon came in yet for spring planting, and his answer is along the lines of: “Yeah, sure thing, boss — I’ll check that out for you just as soon as I find a chance to put down this 75-pound bag of redwood chips that, as you can plainly see, I am currently schlepping.”

I’m sure the linguists have a term for it — the use of a word that, given the tone with which it is spoken, means pretty much the opposite of its dictionary definition.

Because he doesn’t at all mean, in calling me “boss,” that I am akin to his employer, or person to whom he directly reports. He doesn’t mean “yessir, right away, sir.” He means that from his point of view, I am obnoxiously acting as if I am his boss, when in fact he’s pretty much a free agent, and is quite obviously otherwise occupied for the time being.

I’m not sure if women hear “boss” tossed around in this manner by Millennials and Gen Zers, but would be interested to hear if that’s the case, or if young people use “ma’am” or some other term, delivered with a sarcastic edge, to express a similar “OK, Boomer” attitude.

It’s a thing now, as perhaps you have noticed. The customer is not always right.

And, you know what? Speaking as an Old, I’m really OK with that. Too much of the time the verbal terms of respect for people who are one’s elders has for too long been of the Eddie Haskell variety. The teenage character, played by Ken Osmond on “Leave It to Beaver,” would feign high politeness to parents — “The weather appeared as if it might turn inclement, Mrs. Cleaver, and so I have taken the liberty of closing your windows’’ — and then turn around and dis the old dame once out of her earshot.

At Osmond’s death two years ago, Cory Franklin in the Chicago Tribune had this fascinating tidbit: “Psychologists use the term ‘Eddie Haskell syndrome’ for people who reserve one personality for superiors and another for underlings.” And Matt Groenig has called his character Bart Simpson “the son of Eddie Haskell.”

I had been thinking about this “boss” bit and what it means when I heard — on the podcast “Bandsplain” I recently wrote about in this space — two young people using a term, similar in a sense, that was entirely unfamiliar to me: “edgelord.”

In a discussion of Randy Newman’s proclivity for speaking in the voice of someone utterly despicable — often a Southern White racist — in his songs, Yasi Salek and her guest Molly Lambert pondered whether he was using these characters for satiric effect or whether he was in fact an edgelord.

One turns to the Oxford English Dictionary at such times: “noun, informal: a person who affects a provocative or extreme persona, especially online (typically used of a man). ‘Edgelords act like contrarians in the hope that everyone will admire them as rebels.’”

Damn, that’s a useful term. Going forward I will assume that dudes who pretend climate change isn’t real are simply being provocative.

But, Youth, in exchange for Olds declining to be creepy lurkers as well as not minding being called boss, could I ask in exchange for a diminution in the ability to be triggered by, say, literature? The University of the Highlands and Islands in Scotland has placed a “content warning” for its students on Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea” because the book contains “graphic fishing scenes.” Which of course it does. But we all need to be OK with that. Thanks in advance, mgmt.

Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. [email protected].