Radical. Tubular. Bodacious. Gnarly. Basically anything a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle would have said.
Cowabunga it is, then!
18 year old daughter just uttered “gnarly” tonight during a horror movie.
We were shocked!
“gnarly” still exists as a word for convoluted or fouled.
Gnarly is back thanks to Katseye
I love surfer slang because it’s rooted in a verbose comprehension of the English language. The hyperbole of it brings me joy lol.
God its hard to remember but yes all of those were said completely seriously, not a drip of sarcasm or tongue in cheek. Now it’s hard thinking that anyone would say tubular without being completely ironic
“Tubular” is from surfer lingo right? It makes a lot of sense when you realize they’re comparing whatever cool thing you’re talking about to a wave like this: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/1mXQaSA3-rE
It only works when you say it with that TV California surfer accent too though, like
Shyeah, duuude, it’s like tohtally tubular! 😎
I didn’t learn until an embarrassingly late age that you shouldn’t say “jewed them down” or “I got gypped” when discussing prices, etc. Once it dawned on me what I was saying, I felt pretty mortified, but I grew up hearing them as normal words. It was just a thing you say.
Same with me. Didn’t even think of where it came from.
I still use most of the hella tight slang I grew up with
hella
i picked this one up from living in california for 15 years and it keeps tripping up the people i talk to everywhere else i’ve lived since then.
i don’t even notice that i do it until someone points it out to me. lol
I feel like hella was the west coast version of wicked.
That was hella wicked.
I dig your vibe, dog.
Who you calling a dog, dawg?
I’m finna get my homeboys to whoop your ass, you dig homeslice?
Yo Bro, cool your jets.
I called something “the bomb” the other day and my mind did a record scratch, like, did I actually say that unironically??
My nephew’s initials are b.o.m.b unintentionally.
He’s the bomb.
Huh.
Retard.
I really try not to say this out loud. Im mostly successful. Its deeply imprinted.
I hate how that word became pejorative, because it was used correctly. By the way, it’s still used in plumbing. Retard is a verb which means to slow, e.g. retard the flow. When you call a person who is developmentally disabled that, yes it’s rude, but it means their mental process is slow. The word was being used accurately. It’s just not nice to say.
I don’t think “window licker” was ever accurate, but for some reason it’s slightly more socially acceptable to say (or imply, e.g. “I will say this for him, his windows are always clean”).
There’s a few term of that kind of age which were like that. Medical terms or just plain English words that became labelled “derogatory” because of how they were used. I always felt it showed how poor the vocabulary of some people was. If they only knew the derogatory meaning they’d get offended by it’s use in all situations even if the meaning was innocent.
It doesn’t mean their mental process is slow. It refers to developmental retardation. As if the person’s body is just going to “catch up” one day… Which is why it was a stupid thing to say all along.
I’ve been hearing this a lot more within the last ~14 months.
“Everyone’s always asking me: ‘What are you doing, retard?’, but nobody ever asks 'How are you doing, retard?'”
How are you doing retard?
❤️
Or it’s more derogatory sibling, Fucktard.
pivotal comma
That was very common when I was growing up. Unfortunately, it has been replaced with variations of autistic, though “anti-woke” people will use both.
Eh, I use it for very stupid people. Obviously devoid of ableist intent.
I feel as though the context matters with this. For the genuinely evil and criminally unintelligent I would use the clinical “Mentally retarded”.
“Retard” and music (low volume) on buses are the controversial hills I’m willing to die on.
Pick better hills.
Maybe later, for now I have petty culturally unpopular positions that I will maintain. They are few but they are mine.
Maybe by you… Unfortunately.
Information superhighway
We were so full of hope.
Have you seen a superhighway? It’s still accurate.
Surfing the world wide web. Sounds so dumb now.
Surfing the world wide web. Sounds so dumb now.
I dunno I still kinda love it. In part I think it might sound a little dumb now thanks to how big money has turned the primary web interaction into “Schlorping at the Centralized World Trough.”
But web surfing is still a thing with the Indie Web, and it can still be an apt description because you can catch and ride “waves” of various networked pages and find really neat stuff. There was a sense of exploration to it, the whimsy that you could get carried really far from where you started and potentially have a lot of fun along the way.
I still like to surf the web. Cowabunga. :)
You just described going down a Wikipedia hole too. Always a good way to procrastinate
And the act of traveling on said highway was…surfing. For some reason. The 90’s were stupid, and I’m from there.
Now we sail the high seas.
Now it’s just a series of tubes
One could even call it… tubular
I love it when threads come together
It’s more like four tubes and then a whole bunch of tiny little hose pipes.
Syke. Or psych. Early 90’s kid slang, had a definition akin to just kidding or fooled you but more mean spirited. Said to mark the previous statement as intended purely to mess with the listener’s mind or psych them out. Similar in spirit to ending a sarcastically spoken sentence with “NOT!” though distinct.
“Yeah man, you can drive my car. Psych! You’re not touching my ride.”
The more I type about it, the less “psych” looks like a valid English word.
We spelled it “sike”. No clue why.
Cause the cool kids didn’t read
This is truer than you might think. A lot of slang developed out of a need to express oneself without having the vernacular (or even desire) to clearly articulate. It leads to innovating interesting (and in some cases more practical) new ways to say something in a way others (typically in your in-group) can understand easily.
I suspect a lot of that crazy Gen Z stuff comes from kids getting into social media well before fully developing their own social skills, so it just started manifesting through terms and phases they picked up from video games and such.
Supersingular isogeny key exchange (SIKE) is very secure post-quantum replacement for Diffie-Hellman…
SIKE!
Because it started in grade school, and grade school kids were not aware of the word “psych.” So they spelt it how it sounded. Sike or syke, they’re both equally incorrect, but the point is the kids who used them were using them correctly.
The only thing remotely weird about it was when they learned the word “psych” and thought they meant two different things (like they don’t believe “psyching someone out” is a thing, like it does not click for them).
To add to the confusion: For 2 weeks/year I help out the local ballet studio with stage crew. We have this big white backdrop curtain, and colorful lights are pointed directly at the curtain to make dramatic and moody changes to the background during certain dances. When I heard the name of these, I assumed it was the “psyche curtain” and “psyche lights” because that’s how it is pronounced.
Turns out the box is marked “Cyc.” I have to assume that the people that sold the curtain are way less amateur than I am, so I would like to add this third potential spelling.
Cyc is short for cyclorama. A way of lighting a backdrop which kind of wraps around a stage, that wrap around effect which lead to the name.
OMG, I haven’t thought about one of those since I stopped taking ballet. Learned all those French spellings, never thought about how to spell the “Cyc” curtain/scrim, only that we were to stay well clear of it because it was super expensive and can’t be repaired. (Expensive bc huge seamless fabric stretched on a curved frame, and any repair would ruin the seamless illusion.)
I had always assumed it was humorously mis-spelling the word. Like people who would spell it “kool”.
Could be. I just figured since it started in grade school, it wasn’t intentional.
Of course it is. Go rewatch a few episodes of “Psych!” to cure yourself of doubt.
You know I know that you’re not telling the truth.
🍍
Dude, don’t try to psych me out! You and I both know it’s:
🎶I know you know that I′m not telling the truth,
I know you know they just don’t have any proof.
Embrace the deception, learn how to bend
Your worst inhibitions tend to psych you out in the end🎶
PJ & Duncan earned exclusive rights to that term in perpetuity with their seminal classic “Let’s Get Ready To Rhumble”
The more I type about it, the less “psych” looks like a valid English word.
…because the word is ‘psyche’: “I psyched him out.”
I think it’s Greek origin, and it’s like “psychology”.
“Psyche” is a different word to “psych” in English. “Psyche” is a noun, pronounced “sye-kee”; “psych” is a colloquial/casual verb, pronounced “syke”.
One’s psyche (2 syllables) is one’s soul/personality/mind. It’s not a verb.
They all come from the Myth of Psyche (also 2 syllables) a princess loved by Cupid and disliked by his mom.
Psyche (mythology) - Wikipedia https://share.google/kjpSB8R9ySQPDwx6k
it’s a free country!
Lord help us. Hopefully we can hear it again!
Fo sho, mostly because growing up made me realize I’m never really sho of anything no mo.
All that and a bag of chips
I once had a coworker who said she was all that and a bucket of chicken. Black lady, too. I would not repeat it… to her. I’ve since picked it up. “All that and a b_____ of ch_____” is the new saying, and anything that starts with a B that makes sense with something that starts with ch- fits. I haven’t actually heard any others, but I noticed that pattern was maintained across the two.
…“All that and a board of cheese”? Maybe…
When something was “dry” it meant it was bad. Never heard it again after I finished middle school.
Grody.
I still call things grody, but it’s apparently twee and shit to say now.
Grody to the max.
Bread. Yes, the word bread. It was quite popular in northern India. We use to call stupid people bread. Like, “Tu bread hai kya?” (Are you bread?)
This was alternative to the word “chutiya”, which is a curse word, that we could use in front of teachers and elders.
Dope
Beefed it / Biffed it
Dope isn’t a thing anymore? My heart sank a little…
It’s alive as long as dope motherfuckers like you and me keep using it.
I say that shit all the time and teach my kids too. Pretty much has gradually settled into a term of serious admiration for particularly tasty art (of any kind).
I still say ‘biffed it’ sometimes.
Ex: “You fucking biffed it hard on that last jump there, bud.”
Don’t hear “house” meaning to destroy something anymore.
Ima house you.
I’m about to house this burrito.This is in common use in my area with slightly modified context. To “house” something is to envelop and incorporate it, almost always in reference to food. Threatening to house someone would be weird and vaguely sexual, “bro fuckin housed those crispitos” is a normal thing to hear
Interesting, I haven’t heard it since the 90s. Do you pronounce it with an s or z? We said s, even though the normal verb form (eg “the governor housed 10000 homeless people with the latest bill”) is said with a z for me.
I hear both but say z
XD is pretty rare as an emoticon now.
Also abbreviating you as u, to as 2, for as 4, etc. Probably because we have full keyboards and not numpads anymore.
