Has Our Wickedness Made Us Sick?: A Study of Semantic Shift in Slang Usage
Samantha Parkes and Rebecca Wilner
Structure of English
Prof. Baron
Introduction
In March of 2009 one of the authors invited her 24-year-old nephew, Christopher, to visit
for spring break. A recent graduate of the University of Colorado, he was excited to see our
nation’s capital. At every attraction, he expressed his amazement and excitement by exclaiming,
"That was sick!" The Washington Monument, the Vietnam Memorial, the Capitol building itself,
were all "sick!" In the same week, the TV show “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon” made its debut.
During the second episode, Fallon responded to a remark made by Tina Fey by saying, “That’s
sick.” Fallon did not mean “sick” in the traditional sense, meaning “suffering from or affected
with a physical illness; ailing” (The American Heritage College Dictionary, 1993). Both Fallon
and Christopher used sick to mean, “possessing exceptional talent. bad-ass” (Slangsite, 2009),
“crazy, cool, insane” (Urban Dictionary, 2009), “Excellent! Good!” (Duckworth, 2009).
We found these two experiences enlightening for several reasons. Christopher and
Fallon’s use of sick demonstrates that the word has undergone a semantic shift—specifically, an
amelioration. According to David Crystal (2003), amelioration describes when a word “develops
a positive sense of approval” (p. 138), while also maintaining its original definition. We were
curious to know who else might be using sick with this positive connotation.
The authors had rarely heard the word sick being used by speakers of Standard American
English as slang; to hear it multiple times in one week was noteworthy. Such usage also raised
the question of why the authors had not heard sick (with this meaning) being used more often.
David Crystal (1997) notes that “[slang is] informal nonstandard vocabulary, the jargon of a
Parkes & Wilner | 2
special group” (p.437), and David Hummon (1994), speaking specifically about college slang,
writes that “college slang is subcultural in meaning, more often than not communicating the
values of undergraduates rather than the concerns of other adults in and outside of the academy”
(p.77, emphasis in original). It is likely that both and Jimmy Fallon and Christopher used the
word because they identify themselves as part of the college subculture. Like Christopher, Fallon
is also a recent graduate (Associated Press, 2009).
In contrast, the authors no longer see themselves as members of the undergraduate
(college) subculture, and thus would not likely have encountered the word sick with a positive
connotation. However, as people like Christopher and Fallon move out of the college subculture
and interact more with the mainstream, those who had not heard sick used to express approval
are becoming increasingly aware of its existence. For the purpose of this study, we define
mainstream as college-educated adults between the ages of 18 and 65. We chose this age range
because 18 is the age that most students enter the college subculture and 65 is the standard age at
which people retire from the workforce, which may also affect their slang usage. This study
examines whether people in the college-educated mainstream, and those currently in college, use
and are aware of sick. Henceforth, all references to sick (and the other words in our study) refer
to its slang usage – meaning “good” or “awesome,” unless otherwise indicated.
I.
Statement of Purpose
We wanted to examine words like sick that bear positive connotations in slang while
maintaining negative denotations in current everyday parlance. Some examples that we have
observed in slang besides sick are ill, wicked, bad, and dope. Figure 1 shows the terms sick, ill,
wicked, bad and dope with the first definition listed for each in the American Heritage College
Parkes & Wilner | 3
Dictionary (1993), along with the slang definition of those same terms, as well as the date of
their first recorded slang usage (in parentheses) from the Oxford English Dictionary (1989):
Word
Sick
Ill
Wicked
Bad
American Heritage College Dictionary
Definition
Suffering from or affected with a
physical illness; ailing (p.1265)
Not healthy, sick (p. 676)
Evil by nature and in practice (p. 1541)
Not achieving an adequate standard; poor
(p. 101)
Dope
A narcotic, especially an addictive one
(p. 412)
Figure 1 – Dictionary Definition Comparison
OED: Slang Definition and First Usage
Excellent, impressive; risky (1983)
Excellent, attractive; fashionable (1986)
Excellent, splendid; remarkable (1920)
Formidable, good…. As a general term of
approbation: good, excellent, impressive;
esp. stylish or attractive. (1987)
excellent, great, impressive (1981)
We hypothesized that the majority of a sample of the American mainstream population
(college-educated adults or those currently in college) would recognize these words being used
as slang, even if they themselves do not use them. According to Bucholz (2000), “Slang…is the
most noticeable linguistic component of youth-based identities,” leading us to hypothesize that
people who identify with the college subculture will use sick more often than people who do not.
Our study examines a population between the ages of 18 and 65, though we hypothesize that
people between the ages of 18 to 30 will identify more strongly with the college subculture than
those over 30. We further hypothesized that people would perceive the entrance of sick into the
American English lexicon to be a new development, occurring in the last two years. Finally, we
hypothesized that people who do use sick with a positive connotation would perceive this usage
to be older than would people who do not use it.
Slang in Context
While most native or fluent speakers of a language generally recognize a slang term when
they hear it, scholars have some difficulty agreeing on a single definition of slang. The American
Parkes & Wilner | 4
Heritage Collegiate Dictionary (1993) defines slang as “a kind of language especially occurring
in casual and playful speech, usually made up of short-lived coinages and figures of speech
deliberately used in place of standard terms for effects such as raciness, humor, or irreverence”
or “language particular to a group; argot or jargon” (p. 1279). In his preface to The Dictionary of
American Slang, Stuart Flexner says, “I regard slang as a language that is not accepted as ‘good,
formal usage’ by the majority of the public and that is largely part of oral, rather than written,
expression” (Flexner, 1975). However, Jonathan Lighter, in his introduction to the Historical
Dictionary of American Slang, defines slang as “an informal, nonstandard, nontechnical
vocabulary composed chiefly of novel-sounding synonyms for standard words and phrases”
(Lighter, 1994: xi-xii). Whether formal or informal, oral or written, these scholars agree that
slang is an alternative to standard language.
Researchers not only write about what slang is, but also about how and why we use it.
Finegan (1994) suggests that slang is a variety of speech “used in situations of extreme
informality, often with rebellious undertones or an intention of distancing its users from certain
mainstream values” (p. 373). Crystal (1997) agrees that slang is “a colloquial departure from
standard usage” (p. 53), but goes on to say that
[slang] is often imaginative, vivid, and ingenious in its construction –
so much so that it has been called the ‘plain man’s poetry’. It thus
especially attracts those who, for reasons of personality or social
identity, wish to be linguistically different – to be one of the gang,
whether the gang in question be soldiers, nurses, actors, footballers,
prisoners, warders, linguists, gays, or pop singers. (Crystal, 1997: 53)
Clearly, people use slang to show membership in a particular group, but once they leave that
group, it is less clear what happens to those language forms. Perhaps these words are recycled by
being used in new contexts, or perhaps they are new words altogether.
Parkes & Wilner | 5
One aegis under which to study slang has been the broader issue of where new words
come from. According to John Algeo (1980),
New words come from novel combinations of word parts that are
already in the language…to a lesser extent they come from…
shifting the use of a word....[L]ess commonly, new words are
shortenings of old ones…or blends of existing words and wordparts, or borrowing from other languages. (p. 272)
As we will see, Algeo’s categories are present in the slang data reported in this study. Novel
combinations include words such as: fuckup and badass. Shifted usages include: cool, nice, or
sweet. Examples of shortening are: rad (from radical) and redick (from ridiculous), and blends
include: far out, hella- or helluva (from hell of a), and cool beans.
To the extent that we use words already in our lexicon to derive new terms, there are two
possible ways to create new words: functional shift (or change) and semantic shift. The more
clearly recognizable of the two is functional change, which Crystal (1997) defines as “an
alteration in the role of a linguistic feature in historical development “or “the use of a word in
different grammatical roles (round the corner, a round table)” (p. 428). In discussing functional
shift, Garland Cannon (1985) notes that “most scholars give their primary attention to five shifts
– between verbs and nouns, between adjectives and nouns, and verbs from adjectives” (p. 415).
This process of functional shift (that is, shift in grammatical category) is common in language
change in general, and is not unique to slang. Alternatively, Algeo (1980) points out that
“[semantically] shifted forms are a poor second in the neology sweepstakes, accounting for about
one-seventh of the total number of new words (14.2 percent).” He goes on to define semantically
shifter forms as “words that have been used in a new meaning and sometimes as a new part of
speech, usually without any change in form” (p. 270). For our purposes, we will consider only
Parkes & Wilner | 6
semantic shift, as all of our examples were originally adjectives, and maintain that function in
their slang usage – that is, they have not undergone a functional shift.
Semantic shift is a difficult process to measure in language change. In his discussion of
slang terms, Moore (2004) writes about the concept of a counterword, which Flexner (1975)
calls “an expression whose meaning has expanded to a broader and more general applicability
than that of the term’s original referent” (quoted in Moore, 2004: 59). However, the words
included in our study are not examples of counterwords, but rather what Mauer (1980) calls
neosemanticisms, that is, “words or groups of words already in the language that acquire fresh
meanings by use in new situations” (p.184). We argue that the words in our study are not simply
augmenting their traditional meanings when they are used in slang, but are acquiring “fresh” – in
fact opposite – meanings in new situations.
Much research has examined the behavior of a particular word or expression over time,
such as dude (Kiesling, 2004), batshit (Peters, 2006), and ripoff (Block, 1970). Others have
looked at a group of people and their slang, such as nursing students (Olesen & Whittaker, 1968)
or students at a particular university (Dundes & Schonhorn, 1963). Still other researchers have
examined a certain type of slang, such as racial slurs (Henderson, 2003), jazz slang (McRae,
2001) or military terms (Brackbill, 1928; Shafer, 1945). Despite this research corpus, we have
not found discussions of semantic shifts especially in words such as sick, where the meaning has
shifted so drastically.
II. Research Design
The goal of this study was to determine to what extent people of a wide range of ages
(18-65) identify the words sick, ill, wicked, bad, and dope as having positive connotations in
slang usage, by asking a sample of them (n = 86) if they use the terms positively. The study also
Parkes & Wilner | 7
asks subjects for their opinions on how long these terms have been used in slang (by other
people). Additionally, we asked subjects to indicate other words that are used in slang to mean
“good” or “awesome,” in order to determine whether there were other words that followed the
same patterns but were not included in the initial study design.
We posited that sick is being used in the American mainstream in much the same way as
Jimmy Fallon and Christopher used it. Specifically, we predict that members of our sample
would
•
recognize sick as slang regardless of whether they use it.
•
say that sick is a new term, entering slang in the last two years.
Moreover, we predicted that members of our sample who
•
are 18 to 30 will use it more than those 31 to 65.
•
use sick would believe it has been used longer in American English than people
who do not.
Method
To test our hypotheses, we distributed a survey via e-mail (see Appendix A). In it, we
asked participants for demographic information, including: age, sex, and where they went to
college. We asked about their educational background because previous research (Crystal, 1997;
Dundes & Schonhorn, 1963; Olesen & Whittaker, 1968) provided evidence that educational
background meaningfully affects language use, and thus would be a salient feature in the data.
The survey was composed of six questions. The first was, “Do you use the following
terms [sick, ill, wicked, bad, and dope] to mean “good” or “awesome?” Participants were asked
to mark yes or no for each word in the table. The second question asked, “How long have you
been using these words in that way?” and participants checked boxes indicating amounts of time
(less than a year to more than 10 years). The third question was “Do you still use the words this
way?” and respondents indicated the frequency (never to all the time) with which they used the
Parkes & Wilner | 8
words. The fourth question was, “How long do you think these terms have been used to mean
‘good’ or ‘awesome’?”, and respondents checked a box similar to that in question 2. Subjects
were then asked two free-response questions (numbers 5 and 6, respectively): “What are some
other words that are used in slang to mean ‘good’ or ‘awesome’ but also mean something
different?” and “Do you have any other comments? Or is there anything you’d like to clarify?”
Subjects
The survey was initially distributed to a convenience sample (n = 50) who were asked to
forward it to others, thereby creating a snowball survey. Ultimately 150 surveys were returned,
101 of which were completed correctly. Surveys from participants below the age of 18, over the
age of 65, or who had not gone to college were excluded from data analysis – leaving us with a
sample size of 86.
III. Results
Figures 2 and 3 represent the demographic information (sex, and age in years,
respectively) of the respondents to our survey. The respondents’ ages ranged from 18 to 65, and
the mean was 37.7 years of age (median = 23.5, mode = 25). The total sample was divided into
three age groups: 18-30 (n=40), 31-50 (n=27), and 51-65 (n=19). Figure 2 shows the ratio of
female to male respondents, with 57 females (64%), and 29 males (36%).
M
34%
Figure 2 – Sex
F
66%
51 - 65
22% 18 - 30
47%
31 - 50
31%
Figure 3 – Age
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Figure 4 shows the number of people who answered “yes” to question 1 on the survey, “Do
you use the following terms to mean ‘good’ or ‘awesome’?” The majority of the respondents
(54.7%) did not themselves use any of the terms with a positive connotation. The term wicked
was used positively most often (with 30.2% positive responses) followed by sick (with 23.3%
positive responses) bad (18.6% positive responses) dope (10.5% positive responses) and ill
% of total sample
(5.8% positive responses).
40%
30%
30.2%
23.3%
20%
18.6%
10.5%
5.8%
10%
0%
sick
ill
wicked
bad
dope
Figure 4 – Reported usage of words
Figure 5 breaks down the data reported in Figure 4 by age group. It shows the percentage
of subjects who reported using each of the five words by age group, having eliminated all of the
responses marked “I do not use these words.” Subjects in the 18-30 year age range use sick the
most with 40% of respondents in that age group reporting having used the word. Of the subjects
who responded “yes” to question 1 “Do you use these words to mean ‘good’ or ‘awesome’?”, the
most popularly used word was wicked with a total of 84.1% reporting that they use this word
positively. Thirty-five percent of them were in the 18-30 age group and 33.3% were in the 31-50
age group. Respondents in the 51-65 age group reported not using sick, ill, or dope at all to mean
“good” or “awesome.”
Parkes & Wilner | 10
% of total sample
40.0%
35.0% 33.3%
40%
30%
20%
14.8%
10%
10.0%
0.0%
22.5%
18.5%
17.5%
15.8%
10.5%
7.4%
0.0%
3.7%
0.0%
0%
sick
ill
18-30
wicked
31-50
bad
dope
51-65
Figure 5 - Most commonly used words in each age group
Figure 6 summarizes how long respondents indicated having used these terms to mean
“good” or “awesome.” The original survey included five categories (less than 1 year, 1-2 years,
3-5 years, 5-10 years, and more than 10 years) which were collapsed into three categories to
display a clearer picture of the degree to which respondents feel a word is “new” (less than two
years old), “has been around for a while” (3-10 years old), or is “old” (more than 10 years). After
eliminating responses marked “I don’t use it this way,” 16.3% of the positive responses indicate
that subjects have been using wicked for more than ten years, and 10.5% reported using it for
more than three years. Bad is perceived to be the second “oldest” word in the study with 14% of
total respondents reporting having used it for more than ten years, closely followed by sick with
12.8%. It is interesting to note that an average of 9.3% of people reported using each word as
slang for more than 10 years.
Parkes & Wilner | 11
% of total sample
20%
15%
16.3%
14.0%
12.8%
10.5%
10%
5.8%
5%
3.5%
7.0%
4.7%
4.7%
3.5% 3.5%
2.3%
1.2%
1.2%
0.0%
0%
sick
ill
wicked
< 2 yrs
bad
3 - 10 yrs
dope
>10 yrs
Figure 6 - How long subjects report having (themselves) used the terms positively
Figure 7 reports respondents’ answers to question 4, “How long do you think these terms
have been used to mean ‘good’ or ‘awesome’?” The majority of respondents thought that the
words wicked, bad, and dope had been used (by other people) for longer than 10 years (53.5%,
61.6%, and 44.2% respectively). Though the words sick and ill did not show the same popular
response in any one time frame, 27.9% of all respondents reported thinking that ill has been used
positively for less than 2 years making it the “newest” word in the study.
70%
61.6%
60.5%
53.5%
% of total sample
60%
44.2%
50%
27.9%
27.9%
40%
30%
20%
40.7%
27.9%
39.5%
44.2%
29.1%
16.3%
11.6%
5.8%
10%
9.3%
0%
sick
ill
< 2 yrs
wicked
3 - 10 yrs
bad
dope
>10 yrs
Figure 7 - Total Perceived General Usage – How long the total sample population thinks these terms have been used
positively (by other people)
Parkes & Wilner | 12
Figure 8 compares subjects’ responses to question 1, “Do you use the following terms to
mean ‘good’ or ‘awesome’?” and their answers to question 4, “How long do you think these
words have been used to mean ‘good’ or ‘awesome’?” We wanted to see if there was a
difference in the perception of how long the words have been used as slang (by others) between
people who themselves use sick and those who don’t. The data show that 86.3% of the people
who do not use sick (which was 76.7% of the total sample) believe that it has been used for 3
years or longer. In contrast, 95% of the people who do use sick (which was 23.3% of the total
sample population) thought that it was older than 3 years. In other words, the data suggest that
% of total sample
people who report using sick positively, think that it is “older” than people who do not use it.
70%
60%
50%
40%
30%
20%
10%
0%
63.6%
50.0%
45.0%
22.7%
5.0%
13.6%
< 2 yrs
People who do use sick
3 - 10 yrs
> 10 yrs
People who don’t use sick
Figure 8 - Total Perception of how long sick has been used positively in slang by other people as compared to the subject's
personal usage of it
IV.
Discussion
We hypothesized that people aged 18-65 would be aware of the terms sick, ill, wicked, bad,
and dope because of their presence in the mainstream slang lexicon. “Late Night with Jimmy
Fallon” is only one example of a word such as sick being used to mean “good.” Sick is also
prominently featured in a nationally-televised Old Navy commercial (Old Navy, Inc., 2009) and
Parkes & Wilner | 13
an internet search yields countless examples of sick being used in this positive sense in
newspaper articles (Associated Press, 2002; Danks, 2007), blogs, and other online comments.
We also hypothesized that age would not significantly influence people’s awareness of these
slang words, because we posited that the words sick, ill, wicked, bad, and dope had essentially
been mainstreamed, especially sick. We found that none of our subjects over the age of 50 used
sick, and they were generally unaware of its use, as were most of the other respondents. Of the
people surveyed, 72.1% responded that they have never used sick and they never will.
Of those who reported using sick, 40% are 30 years old and under, making it the most
popular slang word in our study among 18-30 year-olds. This supports our hypothesis that people
between the ages of 18 and 30 would use sick more often than people ages 31-65. However, we
did not expect so many respondents to use and have heard of wicked being used to mean “good”
or “awesome.” Of the people surveyed, 33.3% of the 31-50 age group used wicked, and15.8% of
those in the 51-65 age group used it making wicked the most popular term on our survey, with an
average of 28% of respondents in each age group reporting that they use it (see Figure 5).
We hypothesized that people who do use the term sick would perceive it as being an older
term than people who do not use it. Though both users and non-users believed that sick has been
in the slang lexicon for 3 or more years (see Figure 8), it is notable that people who do use the
term were less likely to believe that it has arrived in slang in the last two years, thus providing
evidence in support of our hypothesis. In fact, 45% of the people who use sick positively claim to
have been aware of its existence for longer than 10 years, while 5% of them suggested that it has
entered slang in the last two years. This finding contrasts with the 13.6% of people who do not
use sick and who believe that it is a new term, entering slang in the last two years.
Parkes & Wilner | 14
We were surprised that people seem to have been using sick in a positive sense for much
longer than we had predicted. We hypothesized that most people would respond that they had
been using sick or had heard it being used to mean “good” or “awesome” for less than two years
but in fact, many responded that they have been using sick or have known of its existence for
more than 10 years (see Figures 6 and 7). Regardless of whether respondents’ memory of when
they began using the term is completely accurate, personal accounts are the only way we have to
assess the longitudinal spoken usage of slang for our sample.
V.
Conclusions
It is difficult to determine exactly when a term enters slang lexicon, and then to follow its
evolution. In this study, we have attempted to examine the question of who uses a particular set
of slang words. Jarod Plotkin (2009) asks “[W]hy are negative sounding words, such as "bad,"
"sick," "ill," and "wicked," sometimes endowed with positive qualities in slang? The answer to
[this] question remains a mystery”
(http://literaryculture.suite101.com/article.cfm/cool_sayings#ixzz0CrUIktTJ&A). Perhaps one
way to approach answering Plotkin’s question is to look once again to Moore (2007), who claims
that slang has a subversive message, regardless of who uses it. We argue that using sick, ill,
wicked, bad and dope to mean “good,” in slang, which is effectively the opposite of their
standard definitions was, at one time, linguistically subversive. We hypothesized that this is no
longer the case and these words are now more commonly used, and our data supported this
hypothesis. Indeed, almost one quarter of our respondents (23.3%) reported using the word sick
positively, and nearly one third (30.2%) reported using wicked. Though the words are not used
by a majority of the population, these numbers are large enough to suggest that sick and wicked
are not being used subversively; indeed they are becoming the new standard.
Parkes & Wilner | 15
In the course of this study, we discovered that people enjoy talking about slang, and have
very strong opinions about whether it should be used. One measure of our subjects’ enthusiasm
was the fact that 88% responded to question 5 (“What are some other words that are used in
slang to mean ‘good’ or ‘awesome’ but also mean something different?), providing over 200
examples of slang words and phrases that they did know other than sick, ill, wicked, bad, or dope
(see Appendix B for a list of these terms). This is an impressive statistic that warrants further
investigation.
Suggestions for Future Research
More research is needed to determine the process by which words ameliorate to the
extent that sick, ill, wicked, bad and dope seem to have done. A corpus study including online
usage might give a better picture of who is using these terms, and how and when they arrive in
the mainstream lexicon. Online data is especially interesting because slang words are not usually
published in print media to the same extent that they are online. More diverse populations should
be sampled, and a more comprehensive study done to investigate the first instances of words
with negative connotations being used in a positive light in any medium. When thinking about
semantic shift, sociolinguists might consider why negative terms are pulled into the slang lexicon
to function as positive interjections, and what factors are present in that change. There is much
that is still unknown about slang, which is why studying it is so interesting. It’s sick.
Parkes & Wilner | 16
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http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=1139821302052&comments&ref=mf
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Parkes & Wilner | 19
APPENDIX A
SLANG SURVEY
Age:
Sex (check one):
Male
Female
Where (city/state/country) did you spend the majority of your childhood?
What racial or ethnic groups do you identify with?
Did you go to college/university?
Yes
No
If yes, where?
1.) Do you use the following terms to mean “good” or “awesome”?
Word
sick
Ill
wicked
bad
dope
Yes
No
2.) How long have you been using these words in that way?
Word
Less than
1 year
1-2 years
3-5 years
5-10
years
More
than 10
years
I don’t
use it this
way.
I used to, but
don’t anymore
Never did,
never will
sick
Ill
wicked
bad
dope
3.) Do you still use these words this way?
Word
Sick
Ill
Wicked
Bad
Dope
Yeah, all the
time
Sometimes
Hardly at all
Parkes & Wilner | 20
4.) How long do you think these words have been used to mean “good” or “awesome”?
Word
Less than 1
year
1-2 years
3-5 years
5-10 years
More than
10 years
Sick
Ill
Wicked
Bad
Dope
5.) What are some other words that are used in slang to mean “good” or “awesome” but also
mean something different?
6.) Do you have any other comments? Or is there anything you’d like to clarify?
Parkes & Wilner | 21
APPENDIX B - Responses to Survey Item 5
The following is a list of all of terms or phrases given in response to item number 5
“What are some other words that are used in slang to mean ‘good’ or ‘awesome’ but also mean
something different?” of the Slang Survey (Appendix A). The number in parentheses indicates
how many times the word was mentioned, if it was mentioned more than once.
133t (it's an
abbreviation for
elite, pronounced
"leet")
A
A-1
Aces
Aight
All that (2)
All that and a bag
of chips
Alright
Amped
Awesome (3)
Bad-ass (4)
Baller
Balls
Bangin
Bang-up-job
Bastard
Beautiful
Bees knees
Bitch
Bitchin' (8)
Bom Crazy
Bomb
Boner-riffic
Bonus
Boss (5)
Brilliant (2)
Chic
Chill
Choice (3)
Classic
Clutch
Cool (48)
Cool beans (3)
Crazy (3)
Crucial
Da bomb (3)
Da shit
Dank
De-lish
Disgusting
Doozy
Ethnic slurs
Evil
Excellent (3)
Exceptional
Fab
Fantabulous
Fantastic
Far out (4)
Fierce
Filthy tight
Fine
Fly (3)
Freakish
Fresh (3)
Fresh ass
Gnarly (3)
Good deal
Great
Groovy (7)
Hella
Hella-cool
Hip (2)
Hot (9)
Huge
I usually modify
and combine with
the F-word
Icy
Insane (2)
Keen
Kickass (4)
Kickin'
Kick-in-the pants
Killer (5)
Kiwi
Lance
Lovely (2)
Mad
Major
Money (3)
Nasty (2)
Nice (7)
Nifty
Nuts
Off the hook (2)
Off the wall
On point
Outstanding
Outta sight (2)
Peach
Peachy (2)
Phat (12)
Pimp (2)
Pisser (only in
Boston "wicked
pissah")
Poppin'
Primo (2)
Prince
Rad (11)
Radical (7)
Raw (2)
Redick
Ridiculous (3)
Right on
Righteous (4)
Right-on
Rock on
Rocked
Rockin' (2)
Rocks (3)
Rockstar
Saucy
Sharp
Shiz-nit
Slammin' (2)
Slick (2)
Smart
Smokin'
Smooth
Snazzy
Solid
Special
Spiffy
Stellar
Stellar
Stupid
Stylin' (2)
Super
Super-cool
Sweet (32)
Swell (2)
Swish
Ten
That's the heat
The bee's knees
The bomb (8)
The bomdiggity
The cat's meow
The man
The shit (9)
The shiznet
The shizz
The stuff
Tight (14)
Tits
Totally
Tough
Twisted
Unbelievable
Unhealthy
Up tight
Wild
Word (3)
Wow
Yes