Slang comes and goes. Every generation has its own way of expressing itself. I genuinely believe that that is part of its appeal. Young people get a thrill from speaking in ways that old folks just don’t understand. We all did it. It’s nice to feel as though you’re more savvy for a change.
There are some slang words and terms that, frankly, I am glad we no longer use. Groovy springs to mind. To me that sounded stupid even when it was popular. Others include:
- Cruisin’ for a bruisin’
- It’s a gas
- Fly
- Made in the shade
- Far out
- All that
- Oh, snap!
- Wack
- Fuzz
- Can you dig it?
- Home skillet
- Foshizzle
- Spaz
- Swell
- To the max
- Party hardy
- Tubular
- Getting jiggy
- Bad (meaning good)
- Dope
- Gnarly
- Stoked
- No duh (another one that always sounded stupid to me.)
- Word
- Rad
- Booyah! (again, stupid.)
- Da bomb
- Gal (discredit much?)
- Baloney
- Malarky
- Square
This will tell you how out of the loop I’ve become. (Or at least it demonstrates how old I’ve become.) While researching this post, I discovered that I still say a lot of things that pop up on several lists of outmoded slang:
- Bummer
- Whatever
- Cool beans
- Drag
- Heavy
- You go, girl!
- I know, right?
- And in my own defense, I only use the following occasionally:
- Let your freak flag fly!
- Psych!
- Boogie
While we’re on the subject, there are two slang words that I really wish would come back into fashion, because I love them:
- Solid. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, meant wonderful or remarkable amongst jazz musicians in the 1920’s. (Check out the song Solid Potato Salad, if you’re wondering how I knew about it.) I just think it’s a nice, solid adjective.
- Bitchin’, or bitchen, as the Online Etymology Dictionary spells it. It was a 1950’s surfer term for good. I like it for its shock value, and its enthusiastic intensity.
The reason I even settled on the subject of slang for this post is that I was thinking about how many times I say “cool” in the course of a day. (The answer to that is “countless”.) I remember that I was about 8 years old when I picked up the word from my teenaged sisters. I wanted so much to be like them at the time. (It’s funny how your perspectives change over the years.) I thought that if I acted like them, I’d gain their approval (Yeah. Not so much), so I went out of my way to find opportunities to throw cool into every possible sentence that I uttered.
Even though saying cool never made me cool, it became one of my default words. If it were removed from my lexicon at this point, I’d be all but rendered mute. At the very core of my being, I love to learn new things. I’m fascinated by trivia, details, facts, and information that I didn’t previously know. If it’s new to me, it’s a safe bet that I’ll find it cool.
According to the I’m sure you know by now, the slang use of cool for “fashionable” is by 1933, originally African-American vernacular; its modern use as a general term of approval is from the late 1940s, probably via bop talk and originally in reference to a style of jazz; the word is said to have been popularized in jazz circles by tenor saxophonist Lester Young (1909-1959). Cool-headed “not easily excited or confused” is from 1742… Meaning “one’s self-control, composure” (the thing you either keep or lose) is from 1966.
But all of this made me wonder why, of all the slang in the world, cool is still cool. It doesn’t show up on any of the lists of outmoded slang words that I encountered. No one seems to roll their eyes when you say cool, as if they’re indulging your old-fashioned manner of speaking so as not to embarrass you. I hear other people say it all the time as well. So I did a little digging, and it seems that I’m not the only one who has asked this question.
I came across an article in the National Endowment for the Humanities entitled, How Did Cool Become Such a Big Deal? and it was an enlightening read. The article says that cool is the most popular slang term of approval in the English language. It asserts that cool is more than a word. It’s an attitude and a lifestyle.
The more I read that article, though, the more I began to feel as though I’ve been doing cool a disservice all these years. It’s a culturally loaded word, when you really delve deep enough into it. It started off, in its slang context, as the exclusive property of Black Americans, particularly of the urban jazz subset. Cool also symbolized the way Black society had to behave, in order to survive, when it came in contact with White society. Cool was all about being forced to thrive in the realm of the downtrodden, and it carries the weight of the difficult history of integration.
I just did a quick and lazy search of my blog posts, and I came across 7 with the word cool in the title. Sadly, not one of them has anything to do with diversity, equity or inclusion. Cool has come a long way, baby.
But has cool come too far? I suppose there’s no way to determine that. Cool, more than any other slang word, seems to have taken on a life of its own. But perhaps we should take comfort in the fact that, even in our ever-changing world, some sort of cool or other is here to stay.
Leave a Reply