Grammar Girl here. I'm Inion Fogarty, your friendly guide to the English language.

Today, we're going to talk about why people use the word sick to mean good.

And then we'll talk about an idea from the 1950s that tried to identify social climbers by their language.

Are you sick of hearing people say things like, I just loved that movie, it was sick?

Or what a good meal, the dessert was sick.

And they don't mean that the food made them nauseated or that the movie was about evil people

with twisted minds.

They're actually using sick to mean

great. And sick isn't alone. There are other words whose literal meanings are negative that people,

mostly young people, used to express positive feelings. For example, dope, dank, and sick's synonym,

ill.

So how does this happen?

How do words like sick come to mean the opposite of what they literally mean?

Do slang usages like this spell the doom of the English language?

And how do we get kids these days to stop turning meanings on their heads?

Well, it turns out that usages like sick for great are nothing new. The process of using words to mean their opposite has been going on for

decades, in fact, centuries, to the point when sometimes word meanings flip in official usage,

not just in slang.

The word bad used to mean good in a cool way for much of the 20th century.

It first appeared on the jazz scene in the 1920s and reached its apex in the 1980s

when Michael Jackson's hit song reminded the world that as a musician and performer,

he was indeed bad.

...