‘Sweet’ slang most definitely not cool to me

Is cool sweet?

Is sweet cool?

It’s not a profound question, but it’s been bugging me for a while.

The two slang words more or less mean the same thing — as in “that’s a cool song” or “that was a sweet movie.”

I have to tell you though, I’d never describe a movie the latter way. Even thinking about it makes me sort of cringe. Better to hear a cuss word than that word, that was once associated only with candy, or hearts, or plants that end in “peas.”

I thought the “sweet” hatred was just some strange quirk in my psyche. But then a friend in Idaho brought up the subject. He’s a newspaper editor with a staff of young reporters. They meet weekly to gather story ideas and the conference room sounds like a nest of baby birds, he told me. Sweet! Sweet! Sweet!

I asked around and found distaste to disdain for the S-word among baby boomer friends. We can’t figure out the lure of the sweet.

We’re sure those other generations — the Xs and Ys and double Zs — would call us doddering and drooling, not flexible enough to embrace a new slang word coined by someone younger than our grandkids. Silly rabbits. It can’t be that. Do they forget we belong to the generation which will not get old?

Maybe it is because the word “cool” had so much clout in our lives — a word that labeled our generation. We didn’t invent it, though. It dates back to the 1880s, when it meant discreet, and later re-emerged as slang for “daring” about 1918.

After World War II, jazz musicians used it and then the beatniks. As in, Allen Ginsberg’s poetry is cool. Or he’s a cool cat or a hep cat. (And, not to digress, but did you know hep is a form of hepicat, a Western African word for “one who has his eyes open?”)

In the 1950s we found that Chevys were cool, and rock ’n’ roll was cool. In the ’60s and ’70s, peace marches were cool, Kurt Vonnegut was cool, Janis Joplin was way cool. In the ’90s, some found money and Wall Street and acquisitiveness cool. Having babies to beat the biological clock was cool.

“Cool” in the mouths of baby boomers was a countercultural anthem to flaunt in the face of parents, The Man, the uncool. “Sweet” has none of that significance, a vapid expression without revolutionary roots, without the undercurrents of societal condemnation.

Most people think the origins of “sweet” as slang was started by hip-hop in the 1990s. But it was also popular for the blink of an eye in the 1930s and 1970s. Recently, Connie Eble, a University of North Carolina researcher, found that “sweet” was the single most used word by students at her school. But its various reincarnations have never had the longevity and widespread clout of “cool.”

Thus, the “sweet” rebellion can’t last forever. In fact, I read the other day the S-word is out of style — as so-yesterday as “talk to the hand” and “American Idol” Randy Jackson’s “whatsupdawg.”

I have hope that I won’t have to listen to “sweet” much longer.

And that is cool.

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