What words or phrases were in your youthful lexicon?
Awesome – Very good
Bitchin – Very good
Bite the big cookie – Die
Boff – Have sex with
Chuck you, Farley – A general dismissal
Cream – 1. To beat soundly (‘We creamed you guys!’); 2. to wipe out spectacularly ('Oh, man; he got creamed!)
Cremated – Cream 2.
Destroyed – Very drunk
Give him a cookie (and maybe he’ll go away) – Third-person dismissal
Oh, Emma! – Oh, wow!
Outrageous – Fantastic
Pissed as a parrot – Very drunk
Polluted – Very drunk or high
Rad, Radical – Very good
Righteous – Very good
Sucks big green donkey dicks – Very bad
Take some Soma – A recommendation to relax
Tart – Girl we’d like to boff (Much amusement at the Winchell’s commercial: ‘Look at that tart! It’s indecent!’)
Too stiff to care – Too horny to care what she looks like (Adapted from a KLOS DJ who said ‘I’m too rich to think.’ – And yes, I know it’s offensive. We were teenagers.)
Toss (off) – Masturbate
Wank – Masturbate
Wanker – Jerk
Cool - I still say this
Marnus - A verb, meaning to make someone in authority look like a fool
Munted - completely wrecked (an object)
Radical (took me ages to lose that verbal habit)
Spunk - attractive guy
Boss! (circa 1983)
Ex! (short for excellent I suppose)
Narly (cool in an unusual way)
Rad (circa 1989, during the whole skater era)
I was in my pre-teens when I threw these around, and I still can’t believe I thought I sounded cool saying them. Then again, I still say dood, awesome, cool, hip, sweet, etc…
[hold out the index finger, as if touching another person, make a hissing sound] sssssssssss (Means you have been totally bested. Defeated beyond embarrassment)
Uhhhhhhhhhhhh . . no. (you have to hold the uhhhh for a long time, as if really thinking about it, then the no has to have an entirely final, and uninterested tone of voice.)
Ya think?
. . . and Senators from the state where the ranch was where they raised the horse you rode in here on. And his whole family!
My sister was a hippie, so I picked it up when I was little. In the mid-to-late-80s I started saying it again. I liked the reactions.
Right on – I emphatically agree. (This is a popular current expression in NoWA.)
I used to say this too. I mentally spelled it ‘gnarly’ though. Insteal of ‘cool’, we used it to describe some sort of misfortune. ‘Man, that was a gnarly wreck!’
“Yeah, man”. “Cool, man”. “What’s up, man”, “Man” was attached to many comments.
“Fuckin’ A”, or “Fuckin’ A, dittybag”, picked up in boot camp by me and thousands of others.
I remember, when I was a kid, Jack Paar hosted the Tonight Show. His tag line was, “I kid you not.” (later the title of his biography) and it was quite popular, mostly w/ adults.
I’m sure there were many more from that era, but I can’t recall any right now.
The only one that stands out in my mind was the use of the word Peck for someone we didn’t like. He is such a peck. I am relatively sure it had its origins in Peckerhead, but I didn’t coin the phrase so I don’t know.
After such things as “far out” and “out of sight” had pretty well run their course, let’s say mid-70’s or so, there was a tendency to rework them into less hippie-oriented expressions. These were aimed at parodying the hippie parlance while acknowledging the relative usefulness of the ideas involved.
Examples:
Farm out
Out of shape
Out of sequence
Right arm
Gravy
Long before “dude” became ubiquitous and more-or-less flattering, it was used by the gang I ran with to indicate somebody who was the equivalent of a nerd or geek. Definitely not the desirable or hip type.
Fuckin’ A and Fuckin’ A Toochie were the height of acceptable, desirable or approving.
Terms I don’t hear so often but were so useful at the time were:
Shithook
Turdknocker
And a word I never heard outside my high school may have been invented there and died there. “Flobbing” referred to elbowing a girl’s bosom as you passed her in the hall. You would “flob some tits.” It was a sport where number of encounters mattered, especially with the more well-endowed subjects. Comparing notes in as descriptive a manner as possible made for pre-bell chatter amongst the gang. Those were the days.
When I was young, “groovy” was used as a mildly derogatory description. It mainly just qualified something, along the lines of “a hippie would call this groovy.” It was used: “Nah, that was a little groovy for me.”
I’m surprised no one has mentioned “wicked,” the wickedest expression from the early 70s.
I still say “far out” and “man” sometimes (rarely together, though). I’m pretty sure we picked it up from Tommy Chong. Being a bit of an absurdist, I liked to say “farm out and gravy” as well. I probably also still say “right on” or “right arm” - but I can’t think of when I last did.
I don’t think I’ve ever called anyone a “dude”, except in imitating Yosemite Sam from the cartoon in which he said to Bugs Bunny, “ya durn dude!”
Let’s see, things that haven’t been mentioned yet from the late 80s:
Heinous, uncool, gross, skanky
barney, kook, eddie (perhaps limited to CA and HI?)
burn (piss take)
Choice - good
Cheeoice - very good
Cheeeeeeeoiiiiice - fucking good
Deadly - good
Wuss - this is an interesting one. As a kid, a wuss was a spiteful person (sometimes also called a ‘cat’). Then I stopped hearing it for fifteen or twenty years until it reappeared as a ‘weak person’. At school, you weren’t a wuss if you ran from a fight, but you were one if you hit a small kid or went home with your bat and ball, etc.
Ace - excellent
Burn (I have no idea what a 'piss take is and I’m a bit scared to know <nudge nudge wink wink>) was something from back in my early grade school days.
Burn (at 9 years old) was pretty rough. Someone insulted you. Someone else went “ooooh! Burn!!!” But the idea of ‘dis’ or ‘snap’ is the same idea. (I think when a car commercial has some very faux german blond Dieter going “ohhhh, snapppp yoooo!”? I no longer know the current phrase for this phenomena.)
Nor did I ever.
I said “cool beans” once while chaperoning a slumber party of my younger sisters and was laughed almost out of the house.