The sickest article you'll ever read

I remember one time during my senior year in high school when I was playing pickup basketball with some friends. I pulled off a fancy cross-over move and made a layup to win the game. During the ensuing celebration, one guy on the opposing team came up to me and said, "Dude, that move was sick."

My face fell, my shoulders slumped, and I spent the rest of the afternoon wondering why people had to be such sore losers all the time. It wasn't until weeks later, when the word "sick" began spreading throughout students' conversations like an epidemic, that I understood I had been given a compliment. Despite all rational reasoning, being called "sick" was one of the highest praises a teenager could receive.

It was around this time that I started losing my grip on language, and I feel as if I've never quite recovered.

When "what's up" became the official greeting of our generation, I was the last one to know. I took the question quite literally and eagerly began recounting the events of my day. Unbeknownst to me, the asker of "what's up" did not require or even expect an actual answer; instead, I was just supposed to say "what's up" back. It was an art that I was unable to master. Maybe it was because I had always hated people who answered a question with a question of their own: "What do you think?" "I don't know, what do YOU think?" Most people eventually stopped saying "what's up" to me, and I'm sure they referred to me behind my back as "that kid who actually tells you what's up."

Maybe I sound like a traitor to my generation, but the truth is that I'm just plain stupid when it comes to modern speech. Sometimes I feel like an old man who puts his arm around your shoulders so you can't get away and tells stories from his past: "Why, I remember when we used to walk 30 miles to school, in the snow, and nobody was complaining that the weather was 'rugged.' Yes sir, we used to look each other square in the eye and say 'hello'; none of this 'yo' and slapping hands business."

I think things would be easier for me if our new language actually followed some sort of coherent pattern. I don't understand how "sick," "disgusting," and "nasty" are now endearing terms. "Hot" and "cool" have become inexplicably synonymous. Completely arbitrary words like "beat" and "whack" have usurped "unfortunate" and "inopportune." I've become so paranoid that when someone says my English paper was "good," I narrow my eyes and search for double meanings. My concept of spelling has gone completely to hell, most recently when I erased the second "R" I had included in the word "dirty."

I'd love to tell myself to just shut up and go with the flow, but it's so much more complicated than that. If someone refers to my backpack as "mad ill," it would be nice to be able to respond immediately rather than ask for a moment to sort through the constantly morphing dictionary in my head. I have to remind myself not to fear someone who is "insane" or "out of control." I guess it's only a matter of time until I'm casually describing my best friends as "homicidal" or "satanic."

I also feel sorry for foreigners who must regret spending money on all of those English classes. Sure, they know how to speak to small children or the elderly, but put them on a college campus and they'll be frantically searching their pocket dictionaries for a translation of "buck wild" or "balleration." Even worse are the senseless abbreviations; imagine a poor Ukrainian exchange student's confusion when he asks about your dinner plans and you reply, "I almost made a rez at Cinelli's but I then I remembered that their zuh made me want to vom."