If someone could furnish me with the memo that I missed where the word “cool” and all of its attendant social connotations was replaced with the word “sick” I’d be eternally grateful. I might even be grateful enough to let you watch as I stab the aforementioned author repeatedly in the face with a shitty stick.
It’s not that I’m keen to put down the kids, or their self indulgent patois, but I can’t see how the word sick could possibly have been considered as a synonym or replacement for cool. The word cool is so ingrained in western culture that it has become an abstract and flighty concept that’s hard to explain and even harder to adhere to. Cool is defined by the situation, the fashion and the people involved. Nothing is universally cool, but almost everything is cool in one way or another.
I suppose every generation feels the need to try and plant their footprints on the language, but in my opinion the word sick just doesn’t fit in with the concept. If you say someone is sick it brings up the vision of a teenage bawsack lying around their house choked with the cold. It doesn’t bring up a picture of Todd McRadd the world champion skateboarding daredevil back flipping his way down the Eiffel tower.
I remember a similar thing as a kid in Ayrshire when the word cool was, for a short time at least, decidedly un-cool. For reasons that will probably always remain a mystery we chose to try and replace cool with the Gaelic word agus though in our ignorance we pronounced it ahy-gus rather than the proper ugh-us. It never really caught on outside of the Irvine Valley though and quickly faded into obscurity along with our misguided use of other Gaelic words like Gallus.
Finally, and in all seriousness, I ask that people in Scotland stop describing things as sick. I ask this not out of any personal malice towards the continuing Americanisation of our culture, but simply because with the majority of Scottish accents the word sick can be misheard as shit…