Since the last couple of years I’ve been resisting my desire to incorporate the snowboarding jargon into everyday conversation. While snowboarding in France, I picked up some new terms. See also Sick is cool, and ripped is buff
Consider the grunt!
While snowboarding in Colorado, last month, a new memory of “pumped” and “stoked”, flooded me. How “sick it” is to “shred gnar”.
This language feels a bit young and funny for someone in my mid-twenties. After watching the Winter Olympics Snowboarding Slopestyle Competitions and hearing the commentators go crazy with their gnars, stokes and other stokes I changed my opinion.
As I watched with fascination and my heart racing as young snowboarders showed off their amazing speed and tricks at the slopestyle competitions held in Sochi in Russia, I was also amused by the commentators who had the whole world on the inside of their sleeves.
They were so elated and excited when Jenny Jones won Britain’s very first medal, a bronze in women’s stopestyle. That they started to cry!
Ed Leigh, Tim Warwood and their friends can’t possibly be that young to have dudish words like squirrely and snow snakes in everyday conversation. It could be that it is now.
Maybe the evolution of our language has led to men and women who are well beyond their on-slope days, sprinkling their everyday conversation with words like gnars or pumps. Perhaps they are stoked, or squirrely when they spend time with their families while eating breakfast, washing dishes and doing homework.
We all talk now about Twittering, Facebooking, Private Messaging, Chick Lit, Buzzwords, LOL, Content Farms, Cyber Bullies, etc. as if we were still in primary school.
If the Olympic commentators are able to “go big”, “get massively pumped” as well as “blowing off the lid” and “going deeply” in hopes that they do not get “squirrely”, “scuffout” or even worse, find a snow snake then I will be stoked just like them. Wait and listen.
This is the only word that I would not say in polite company, but I will use it with my friends. This word is a problem.
The BBC was forced to apologize publicly after British snowboarder Billy Morgan stated: “I thought “huck”.” Although many viewers believed he had used an expletive, “huck” actually means to try a bold performance. Who knew? !