Ah, youth.

To those accounting rulemakers and FASB observers over 50, ASC Topic 350-20-35 – the basics of day-two measurement of goodwill, and goodwill impairment -- doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. To the veterans, the relevant guidance issued by the Financial Accounting Standards Board is in FAS 142 – pronounced “Faz” by the cognoscenti – and in the neighborhood of paragraphs 11 and 15.

The legacy numbers live, as easily heard at FASB meetings and at accounting conferences. A first reference to a rule embedded somewhere in the vast codification, without the old number, typically draws smiles and quizzical looks around the room.

However, newly minted younger accountants, fresh out of colleges and universities, can converse in the brave new numbers of FASB’s four-year-old accounting standards codification. Textbooks feature the new ASC citations. CPAs in their twenties easily navigate the new system of formal references to GAAP, a FASB member and a leading accounting academic tell BNA.

Larry Smith, a board member, said Aug. 22 that the post-graduate technical assistants who work at FASB as junior staff members “are extremely well-versed” in the codification. (In rulemakers’ shorthand, that would be “the cod.”)

“They’re using the codification numbers,” said Smith, who acknowledged that the over-50 types continue to speak in a common language anchored in the old FASB statements.

The apparent everyday familiarity with the new numbers – at least in the younger generation of CPAs – means that the new reference system is being taught well at the leading universities. The ingraining is going on, as confirmed by Terry Warfield, chair of the accounting department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Warfield said the observation of the FASB member is not surprising.  He, Donald Kieso and Jerry Weygandt have written a textbook, Intermediate Accounting (John Wiley & Sons, publishers), in which the ASC numbers are front-and-center. That text is in its 15^th edition.

“We’ve embraced the codification as the appropriate way” to refer to the GAAP literature, Warfield said Aug. 23. He recalled a recent student presentation in which the participants were able to cleanly execute chapter-and-verse citings in the ASC lingo.

Warfield, a trustee of the FASB’s parent Financial Accounting Foundation, compared that to the times when accountants could reel off numbered FASB-statement references from memory, displaying the knowledge like “a badge of courage.”

In coming days, the older generation of rulemakers might have to turn – perhaps with a trace of hesitation – to younger accountants for the proper reference, in the same way that many parents look to their teen-age (or pre-teen) offspring to solve a computer problem.

• Steve Burkholder, a Bloomberg BNA staff correspondent