The latest "Awesome" words

On a show called Culture Click that I accidentally caught one recent Saturday morning, a girl named Isabella said that “epic,” “beast,” and “legit” are popular words among today’s kids to designate something as “awesome,” which is an earlier and sadly indestructible exclamation to indicate that something or someone is great or “cool.”

I suppose these words, with the exception of “beast,” are preferable to “bitchen,” which was popular in 1966 when Richard Burton mentioned in his diaries that his stepson was saying it. Burton described it as “the new and horrible word for ‘up-to-date,’ ‘modern,’ ‘cool, ‘unsquare,’ ‘with it,’ etc.”

I think I used “cool,” “neat,” and maybe “in,” the last very briefly, when I was a kid, but I began to shun slang by the time I reached my teens, using it only facetiously to mock those whose speech is littered with such crap. Anyone who was truly “cool” or “hip” wouldn’t allow such words in his vocabulary.

Slang always sounds foolish in retrospect. A movie from the 1960s with characters who say “groovy,” or one from the 1950s that allowed the cast to say “Daddy-O,” always look like the works of old fogies desperately trying to appear young and contemporary. The same is true of books. Those that use the slang expressions in vogue at the time they are written are often unreadable, at least to me. Every book and movie reflects the time in which it was created, but only the worst make a conscious effort to be current and are usually laughable only a few years later.

I don’t think you’ll hear a word like “groovy” in any songs by the Beatles, Bob Dylan, or Rolling Stones, but it’s there in songs by lesser artists, most of whom never made it into the 1970s.

Art is timeless and transcends its era. The rest is artifice, not art, and artifice is not “cool,” it’s not “hip,” and it’s certainly not “beast.”

Brian W. Fairbanks

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Solid

“Last night wasn’t the best time I ever had,” the brunette at Panera Bread told her blonde dinner companion, “but it was solid.”

These two twenty-something females were seated in a booth in front of mine. The booth blocked my view, but having seen them arrive I could tell they were cute. As I finished my bacon turkey bravo on rye with tomato soup, I had nothing to do but listen to the rambling thoughts in my own head or eavesdrop on them. The thoughts in my head are more interesting, but I’ve thought them before, so I listened in.

They spoke softly enough that all I could hear were snatches of their conversation. The brunette did all the talking. The only thing that interested me was her use of the word “solid” to describe her evening: “Last night wasn’t the best time I ever had, but it was solid.”

“George, do me a solid,” Kramer once said on an episode of Seinfeld. The brunette seemed to use “solid” in the same way, thereby reducing a perfectly respectable word to a cheap slang expression. “Awesome” fell victim more than a decade ago, and has been banished from my vocabulary as a result. “Solid” may survive, but I’ll be careful to use it sparingly.

© 2013 Brian W. Fairbanks

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