sicknasty

[inhumandecency]

I grew up with people of my parents' generation making tired jokes about how these crazy kids nowadays are using "bad" to mean "good" and who the heck can understand them, anyway? And yet I was still surprised when it happened to me. In the past year or two that I've started hearing people use "sick" as an all-purpose term of approval, and even

Comments

[ytadel]

Teenagers of 2030: "Oh man, you gotta see that movie, it was jihad!"

[minerva42]

I remember "sick" and "sicknasty" becoming common terms in my high school around when I graduated. 2002-2003.

I know a friend who uses "metal" as a term. I remember when a babysitter of mine used "mint". (It was confusing; I wasn't used to language doing that kind of thing.)

[topazirradiated]

yes, I've also heard "retarded".

[inhumandecency]

Interesting! That seems like it's a cross between this phenomenon and anoter one, in which you compliment something by implying that something must be wrong with someone -- perhaps the universe itself -- to allow something of that magnitude to exist. e.g., "they made this crazy huge pizza" or "it was just stupid awesome." I wonder if this is related to the rheorical tradition that gave us complimentary terms of disbelief, like "incredible" and "no way!"

But it sems extra interesting to see "retarded" take on this positive purpose in the same generation that made it into an insult when applied to a person. That's why I think you're right that it's an example of the first thing I was talking about too.

[cherdt]

I thought it was the same sense as the Black Eyed Peas "Let's Get Retarded" -- which, if I understand correctly, is to get drunk/high/etc. until you are acting like an idiot.

[antiquarian]

The Dutch first-year in my department says he picked up that use of "sick" while he was on the tennis team at Mississippi. That same conversation included discussion of "wicked" and "stupid" as intensifying adverbs -- I'd been aware of the former but not the latter.

[inhumandecency]

Interesting! Do you happen to know if English is unusual in the incredibly fast mutation of its youth argot? Or does Dutch just have its own peculiarities like this?

(also, see my reply to topaz, above)

[antiquarian]

This particular conversation was just about those specific bits of English slang. I've heard elsewhere, though, that French slang is at least as dynamic as ours. (And that the French taught in American schools is, to the ears of student-aged native speakers, comically formal and archaic.)

[vvvexation]

I'm not sure if using "bad" to mean "good" and suchlike really does include a shaking off of negative associations. The mention of "wicked" above reminds me that "transgressive is cool"--in other words, it may not be a matter of just taking a word that supposedly is negative and using it positively just because no one else would do that, it may be more a matter of actually valuing "bad"ness, and then carrying that value over into other areas of language.