In the 70s everyone who was 'with' it said 'Cool!' Cool returned a few years ago when the younger set began saying it as if it were some creation of their own. But they used the back of their throats to get a guttural sound out of the first letter (and I know that those reading this are attempting to do that right now. Keep practicing, you'll get it right).
One of my favorite words has always been precipitous. Another is perspicacious. One daughter favors diurnal. Words are like sweet candy as they roll around in your mouth waiting for just the right moment to become sound.
At the present I have settled on the simple word lame. A word that has its roots in Middle English meaning disabled so that movement is difficult or impossible it has come to mean in Modern English, unconvincing or weak. Yet clothes can be lame, as in "You are not leaving this house in that lame shirt" as can a story that is dragging on to seemingly no end and having no point, "that is so lame."
The football games on Thanksgiving Day were lame, as in, who really cared about the teams that were playing.
Lame can mean boring. Lame can mean never-ending, as in 'winter is lame.'
We were told that 'fudge,' 'gosh,' as in 'O my gosh,' and 'shoot,' were really just cleaned up versions of words and phrases good little girls and boys did not say so we should not say them either lest someone think we really meant the bad stuff.
A desultory thought from Sam Rayburn who said, "No one has a finer command of the language than the person who keeps his mouth shut."
Words are telling. They identify the educated, the angry and the lame to name a few.
That's what I think about it.
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