1. Terrific
The root word here is the Latin
terrere, which means terror.
Originally, if your aunt's cooking was terrific, you called it that
because it inspired fear and dread on a life-threatening level. In the
early 1800s, people began to use it facetiously, "That opera was a
terrific bore!"
That morphed into a meaning closer to huge or grand, and by the late
1800s it was being used as it is today, to mean good and happy. (
Awful took
the opposite journey, initially meaning "awe-inspiring" and worthy of
fearful respect. Eventually, following the same methods and timeline, it
came to mean so bad it's worthy of awe. Just … awful.)
2. Swell
This word was transformed by creeping, where one of its outermost
definitions crawls forward, picking up meaning until it has turned into a
whole new term. It starts with the obvious. To swell: To grow larger.
To be big, inflated. Then that became a noun to describe someone who was
big and inflated, an important person. (Watch enough old
Twilight Zone
episodes and you will eventually hear some big shot referred to as a
"Swell.") Then it made the easy leap to "That's really swell!" A big
deal, exciting, and important.
3. Hunky dory
One theory is that
hunky dory came from the Japanese
Honcho dori, which
could translate roughly into "easy street." The theory says it was
popularized by 19th-century white sailors who would hang out on Easy
Streets looking for fun. The problem with that is the timeline:
Hunky Dory was
being used in America by the early 1860s, but Japan had been closed to
foreign fleets (and prostitute-seeking white sailors) up until 1854. So
while it is possible that the term made it from Japan all the way to
popular American vernacular in six years, it's hardly a certainty. The
other theory is
hunky came from
hunkey, which meant "everything's fine," which itself came from the old American slang
hunk, which meant "safe, at home" (
hunker down). Nobody's sure where
dory comes into that theory.
4. Spiffy
In the mid-19th century, a
spiff was a pay bonus that stores
would give their salesmen for moving undesirable products. If you sold
an ugly suit, you got spiffed. There was also
spiflicate, which
was an even older word meaning "to confound, completely overcome." So
you'd spiflicate some poor shlub into buying an ugly tie and then get a
spiff, which you could then put toward getting all spiffed up yourself
to take your girl out. Spiffy.
5. Jolly
Jolly could come from a couple of sources. The most obvious would be the French
jolie,
which, depending on the century, meant, "festive, merry, amorous,
pretty." Jolly is also a uniquely Christmas-y word (Old St. Nick is not
hunky dory. He is
jolly.), so many historians believe it could also come from variations of
jol in Germanic languages. The Germanic
jol means "yule," which in turn means "Christmas."
6. Tickety-Boo
Tickety-Boo, though not used much anymore, is the happiest
of British slang. An upper-class, early-20th-century British-ism for
"everything is just fine,"
tickety-boo most likely came from the Hindustani
ṭhīk hai ("all
right, sir"), which is what your Indian servant might say to you when
you told him to bring 'round the Bentley during the
Raj.
Rear Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten, the last viceroy of India,
popularized the term in the 1940s, and it became regular slang among the
Royal Navy.
7. Gnarly
The origin of
gnarly is painfully obvious once someone has
already revealed it to you. Gnarly comes from surfer slang of the 1960s,
to describe a wave that was difficult, dangerous, and awesome. The
water in the wave would literally appear
gnarled, curled, and messy. If you could ride it, well, gnarly, dude.
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