10 slang words from the ’80s that used to be cool but aren’t anymore
Language has a shelf life. Slang especially. What sounds effortlessly cool in one decade sounds like a Halloween costume in the next, and few eras produced more dateable vocabulary than the 1980s. Valley girls, surfer dudes, mall rats, and MTV-addled teenagers collectively forged a dialect so specific it practically had its own zip code.
Some of those words survived. “Awesome” and “chill” are still standing, battered but functional. The following ten words were once the height of cool. Today, using any of them unironically is a reliable way to watch a room go quiet.
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Tubular
Before it meant a piece of plumbing, “tubular” was the gold standard of surfer approval. Frank Zappa’s 1982 song “Valley Girl” helped cement it in the national consciousness, then made it sound immediately ridiculous.
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Radical
Radical had a respectable political life before the ’80s repurposed it to mean simply “very good,” shortened almost immediately to “rad.” Born in skateboarding culture, it faded when “sick” and “dope” took over the same function with considerably more staying power.
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Gnarly
“Gnarly” arrived from surf culture and hit mainstream consciousness via Fast Times at Ridgemont High in 1982. A word that means everything eventually means nothing, and gnarly today mostly appears in quotes, used knowingly rather than naturally.
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Grody
An inspired portmanteau of “gross” and “grotesque,” grody existed to express a higher grade of disgust than either parent word could manage alone. Pure Valley Girl slang, nobody says it today except in deliberate irony, which is the linguistic equivalent of a retirement home.
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Bodacious
Borrowed from 19th-century Appalachian English, bodacious got a second life in the ’80s, meaning bold and impressive. Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure leaned into it so heavily that using it seriously today feels like historical reenactment.
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Psyche
You’d make a sincere-sounding statement, pause for effect, then hit them with “psyche!” to reveal it was a joke. Memorably deployed in Heathers and other ’80s teen films, today’s equivalent is the deadpan reversal, which requires far less shouting.
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Bogus
Also, courtesy of Bill and Ted, bogus meant fake, unfair, or deeply unsatisfying. Today, it still technically exists but feels preserved in amber, recognizable but completely untouchable.
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Gag me with a spoon
This Valley Girl expression of maximum disgust was theatrical and excessive by design. Today it survives only as a punchline, a period-accurate prop in any ’80s costume party.
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Take a chill pill
The phrase entered the mainstream in the early ’80s, popularized by the Breakfast Club era of teen films. The irony is that chill pills are now so normalized that the metaphor has collapsed entirely, sounding less like slang and more like a genuine pharmaceutical suggestion.
Image credit: IMDb
Totally
What the ’80s did was weaponize “totally” as an intensifier attached to everything. The specific deployment, complete with rising inflection and maximum Valley Girl energy, now reads as pure parody.
Close up of old English dictionary page with word slang
Wrap up
Language is a living thing, and slang is its most combustible element. The ’80s gave us vocabulary that burned bright and hot and left almost nothing behind, which is about as tubular as it gets.
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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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