Oh my god, this is SO COOL!

The quintessential phrase, from the quintessential teenager. Or any-ager really... as long as you talk to people who use the word 'cool', you'll use it.
An evil word, that's what it is... it sucks you in, it drags you down, to where there is no hallow ground to quote Depeche Mode.

Me being a quintessential (almost) teenager (almost quintessential... not almost teenager. I'm dead set in the middle of that right now) use it a heck of a lot, but it got tiresome after, well, last week. When I finally realised that people use this dreadful word, when there is absolutely nothing else to say. They do not say "Awesome" (An other story all together, maybe to be told another time), they do not say "great", they do not say "fantastic" or any of those things... they have all been (almost) unanimously replaced with "Cool!'.

The word has a variety of meaning, ranging from the boring ("Oh, your washing machine is so cool ") to the wacky ("That new peach defuzzer you got is so cool!")
The word also has no meaning. When someone wants one to react favourably, or very favourably to something that they've shown, all one has to do is put on a face of amazement, and chant out "COOL!" like the well programmed drones that we are.

The word is inescapable, the word is all encompassing, the word has completely enveloped the English language, and turned our once (slightly) flowery vocabulary to one which consists of three words ("Hi", "Dude", "Cool")

And the concept of how awesomeness, and generally charisma came to be associated with temperature, absolutely beyond my comprehension. I just picture some wasted youths, sitting on the corner of a street one cold evening saying "Dude, this street is so awesome man" and the other guy says "Dude. yeah, this street is cool".
And that was that. They started an epidemic worse than the Bubonic Plague, mainly because I see no end to this terror in the foreseeable future.

All this having been said, I am now having trouble phasing out that particular word, because its carved out a niche for itself, things which are between 'great' and 'awesome'. or 'awesome' and 'fantastic' are 'Cool'. I think in this way, we get rid of the unwanted, and un-needed explanations, of what exactly we think of your snotty new procurement, and what exactly we would like to do with it. We get out of it by chanting our regular mantra, and get the hell away from there.

What is the point of this, you may ask after you read the whole thing, and see no conclusion.
Well, I just thought I'd post a few thoughts on the youth's collective idol.

The Swearing Mystique (or) Why Do We Have Such An Obsession With Swearing?

I was wondering why people swear... or why should swear?

People, I've observed, generally in situations of dismay, and other varieties of stress and depression, cuss. It seems to me like it is more of a reflex, rather than anything, or an evolution of some 'primeval' swearing, like clubbing the guy next to you on the head till it falls off (the head, not the club).

But that probably isn't it... swearing is a more verbal thing, and it seems to me that my first conjecture is right, it is probably a reflex, like the knee-jerk reaction.

If one is the recipient of bad news, then the first reaction is 'Oh, shit' or if one is of a milder disposition, 'Oh, goshdarn it'. This is immediate, no delay, no thinking involved.

My feeling of this is that a group of people, a trillion billion years ago (a long time), decided to associate bad feelings, and bad ideas, and bad news, and bad anything else, to poo. The next step, was obviously to incorporate more 'vulgar' words, words with more 'punch'.

Getting to my point... Why?

Why do we do this strange, and almost unnoticed ritual? We weren't taught this in schools (most of us picked it up there, but we weren't taught it there), we weren't told to cuss and swear in public, we just do it, because our parents, and whoever else do it, our peers, our not-peers, everyone.

Say we are presented with bad news. We yell 'SHIT!' in horror/anger. Which makes our mood worsen, which makes us yell 'SHIT', which makes our mood worsen, which makes us yell 'SHIT!' which makes our mood worsen, which makes us yell 'SHIT!'... you get the point.

Alternatively, if we scream about something that we like, or about something that pleases us, then (hopefully) we wouldn't be in such a foul mood.

Say you like strawberry cheesecake... when the bad news arrives, scream 'Strawberry Cheesecake!' and people might think you're a bit weird, but also, you might not get as tense. I don't know... I've never tried, which is why this is all conjecture...

At this point some might say 'But I like poo... I thrive on the stuff'.

To you, I have nothing to say, you are beyond the point of saving.