Current slang term for 'cool' or 'hip'

[lindenharp]

My character is a student at Oxford, and is around 20-years-old. He's British by birth with a Spanish mother and is bilingual. He tells an older man that a certain Spanish endearment is very old-fashioned, and offers to teach him some others that are cooler or more hip

Comments

[torn_eledhwen]

That's a difficult one!! My gut feeling says not hip, but cool might be all right. But I'm in my 30s and don't have any exposure to 20-somethings so I'm guessing. :)

[jhall1]

My gut feeling is the same, but I'm 63 so it's even more of a guess!

[sollersuk]

I find the scenario interesting. Unless he's spent a lot of time in Spain with his mother's family, his own Spanish is likely to be old-fashioned, and the idea of getting an older person's language more up-to-date seems odd; certainly in English an older person using modern terms tends to make them look ridiculous.

[nineveh_uk]

I echo this - "actually, people in [country] think my accent/language is old-fashioned" is a comment I've heard consistently from bilingual speakers in this situation. Though perhaps the young man is just back from a gap year working in a Spanish bar and updated his vocab.

My question is why does the older speaker speak Spanish? It wasn't a common language in schools 35 years ago (it is still a long way behind French and German) - the options were basically a degree in it, or tourist Spanish for going on holiday. Though maybe he's just been looking up endearments in the dictionary to use with his young lover, and hasn't realised that the one he has picked is rather nineteenth century ;-)

[lindenharp]

The older man doesn't actually speak Spanish. (He did take German in school, though that isn't relevant to this story.) See added explanation above for more details.

[lindenharp]

While these are very reasonable concerns, they don't apply to my story. See the explanation I've added above.

[welshgirl15]

I'd probably say cool (I'm a 20 year old student). You might want to think about class difference as well as where he grew up, that can make a big difference to what people say.

[xenaclone]

Suggest:

Sick, wicked, ace

[yamx]

One of my students is British and probably around that age, and I've heard her used "wicked."