Rizz. It’s giving. It sends me. If you understood all three without pausing, you belong to a particular world. If you didn’t, you’ve just discovered you don’t. Every generation builds its own semantic field as part of how it defines itself, and the words young people choose are not shortcuts for meaning but membership cards. Slang loses its electricity the moment it gains a broad audience. Here is where ten ’70s words landed.
1. Groovy
Born in jazz clubs in the 1930s and lived for an entire decade. By the early 1970s, it was in Cheerios commercials. That was the end.
2. Far out
A ’70s kid said “far out” to mean something had looped so far beyond normal it came back as impressive. It emerged from psychedelic rock culture and didn’t survive the ’80s. Today it reads as shorthand for the entire decade.
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3. Jive turkey
The spiritual ancestor of “NPC.” Both describe someone performing rather than being. The phrase first appeared in a 1966 Philadelphia Tribune glossary, meaning “liar,” rooted in African American jazz culture. Homer Simpson inherited it as a marker of someone out of touch.
4. Dynamite
The ’70s version of “bussin.” Jimmie Walker’s ad-libbed “Dyn-o-mite!” on Good Times turned pure enthusiasm into a national slogan. Saying it today requires air quotes.
5. Cool beans
Gen Z says “bet” for easy agreement. The ’70s campus crowd said “cool beans.” Its origins trace to a nineteenth-century idiom, but none of that saved it from the harmlessly retro category.
6. Can you dig it?
Both “understood the assignment” and “can you dig it?” ask whether someone is genuinely tracking what’s happening. Drawn from jazz culture where “dig” meant to appreciate something deeply, it spread so far by the late ’70s it lost all its charge.
7. Brick house
The Commodores released the song in 1977. Lionel Richie has said it was a cleaned-up version of a much cruder expression. Unlike “slay,” which Gen Z uses to celebrate without reducing anyone to measurements, this one didn’t age well.
8. Ten-four, good buddy
By 1973, the CB radio craze had handed everyday Americans a truckers’ vocabulary overnight. “Ten-four, good buddy” was the era’s thumbs-up emoji. The CB radio faded. The phrase went with it.
9. Solid
To ask someone to “do you a solid” was to request a favor. When “solid” replaced “favor” is unclear. It resurfaced in the early 2000s on television before losing its fluency for good.
10. Catch you on the flip side
The flip side was the B-side of a vinyl record, a phrase radio DJs used before it crossed into everyday goodbyes. Vinyl made a comeback. The phrase has not.
Wrap up
Slang dies the same death every generation. It spreads too far, gets picked up by advertisers and morning show hosts, and loses what made it worth saying. The ’70s vocabulary couldn’t outlast the decade that coined it. Today’s won’t either.
Related:
- 10 baby boomer slang terms that will make anyone under 40 cringe today
- Popular (& sometimes really gross) slang throughout the years
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This article was syndicated by MediaFeed.org.
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