> Whenever I hear about “broads” or “dames,” I immediately think of Frank
> Sinatra. It was considered “hip” to use those terms, and I don’t think they
> always had the same negative connotation they have today. How about “chick”
> or “gal”? The fact is, we really don’t have a word for the female equivalent
> of “guy.” It’s hard to come up with a term that isn’t sexist, or at least
> condescending.
Frank Sinatra is exactly who I was thinking of too, and he really was rather sexist. He is the primary model in the late 1940’s and the 1950’s of what it meant to be a hip guy, and the sexism was part of the hipness. “Chick” and “gal” are from a little later and were like “dame” rather than like “broad” in not necessarily being as sexist.
When my grandpa (b. 1913) got mad at me he would say, “Why you little so-and-so!” I did not realise that “so-and-so” stood for something like “bastard”, I thought he was calling me a sewing machine or something. He also referred to women as “dames”.
> I don’t know that this is any less enlightened than “bitch” or “ho”, which seem
> to be used frequently by some of today’s popular musicians.
I think that “broad” is approximately equal to “bitch” in its nastiness toward women, but it’s not quite as bad as “ho.” In criticizing Sinatra, I wasn’t letting present-day musicians off. Sinatra was a brilliant musician (which isn’t true of certain modern ones), but he wasn’t a wonderful person.
What about other ways to tell people to hurry up before they even started they even started some task at hand; for instance, after dictating an order to a waitress, telling her “and put some pep in your step, missy!” or “Chop chop!” It’s the same context I usually heard “make it snappy” in; “Gimme’ two eggs over easy, some bacon, and a cup of coffee, and make it snappy!”
A lot of it might seem like movie-speak, but it seems that with the exception of certain cult films like Juno and Swingers, the use of oddball slang one would encounter mostly in cinema isn’t as common now as in the 1940s. Also, FWIW, while we certainly said “Awesome!” quite a bit in the 1980s, I’ve never heard the youth of today use “Extreme!” in the same context, even though such usage is implied in a lot of contemporary marketing.
A few years before that we used to say “mega”, meaning “very” or “to a great extent”. Although come to think of it it was only within my fraternity that I heard and used it–was that just “frat slang” in the late 1970s?
I lost half of my vocabulary when “far out” and “right on” and “bummer” were lost to me. Those phrases, a little love and some weed were all I needed to get by.
My last name at that time sounded a little bit like “Groovy” to some of my students and that’s what they called me – Ms. Groovy.
I grew up saying “Boy hi-dey!,” but outgrew it by the time I was dating at fourteen. I also remember saying, “I’ll swan!” and “I’m tellin’ you!”
“Cool” came into use sometime in the Fifties, I think, fell from grace and then was redeemed fifteen or twenty years ago. “Cool” doesn’t even seem like a slang term to me anymore.
I never did use “keen.” I did hear Judge Marilyn Millian say “peachy keen” the other day. It hurt my ears!
By the time I was a senior, we said, “I kid you not” a lot. That was because of Jack Parr.
Speaking of movies, no one in real life ever called me “Darling.” Major disappointment.
Not even an older storekeeper? That happens here all the time. I’ve even caught myself calling girls (strangers in any sort of stranger-type interaction) “love”. I couldn’t have imagined myself doing that when I was younger, but as I approach forty, it just slips out before I realise I’ve said it.
I know some women find this offensive, but others seem to like it, and most seem not to notice. So it’s just another boulder in the obstacle course of being a guy these days. Also, a lot of women do it themselves. We have one at work who takes it to extremes: she’s a very jolly, funny type, and the rougher, hairier, and more covered in tattoos a guy is (we work with truckers), the more likely it is she’ll call them “petal” or “blossom”. I’m still only worth a “sweetie” from her - I aspire to “blossom”.
