Do you remember the jive of the TMNT. It was this "bodacious," "radical," even "wicked" dialect of surfer talk. As an eight year old I liked this talk. My friends would refer to girls as "gnarly" and each other as "rad." I think Michealangelo, the prognosticator of cool, was the main culprit for this surfer vocabulary. M was also wont to use the great adjective "wicked". When confronted with a horde of the foot. M would often reply with the wonderfully descriptive term, "Wickedd!"
TMNT haven't been around in a while. They're high was probably in the second movie dancing with Vanilla Ice to the "Turtle Rap." Many of you may remember its unforgettable chorus, "Go Ninja! Go Ninja! Go Ninja! Go!" Well Vanilla Ice is out, and so are those lovable TMNT.
However apparently in Maine part of they're vernacular lives on. The term Wicked is used by all "Mainahs" age 35 and below. They never stopped living the TMNT life of martial arts and pizza consumption on an epic scale. At first this really alarmed me, but now I'm starting to become accustomed to the funny talk. My only fear is that I can feel the desire to call things "Wicked Good!" infiltrating my psyche. Pizza Time!
Posted by matt at June 20, 2003 11:15 AM | TrackBackWhile I don't doubt the TMNT lifestyle of the young Maine redneck, I'm pretty sure "wicked" was in the New England vocab before turtle power. (I remember hearing it on very old Cheers reruns.) Either way, I think you'll find this link amusing: http://www.boston-online.com/glossary.html
Posted by: mesh at June 20, 2003 11:30 AMTeenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are actually back and VERY popular. I had to buy one as a gift for a 6 year-old. The $20 price tag was not very rad, however...
Posted by: Bill Colrus at June 20, 2003 11:51 AMWhile growing up in Massachusetts is not quite Maine, I distinctly remember the term wicked being used by all of our friends both older and younger. It is still used today among them which means that the actual age should be 38 and younger, not the 35 and younger that Matt referred to. Who knows, maybe even Matt's mother (another die hard New Englander) might have used the term in her Rockport days and she is even older than 38.
Posted by: MarshallontheMountain at June 20, 2003 12:40 PMI guess were marching slowly southward, but I lived for 14 years in Pennylvania, and yes, wicked was one of those words they used.
Another was was "aina" pronounced ain-uh, which is an abrevation for "isn't it."
Slang like this is one of the things that drove my parents to move our family out of the old, culturally bankrupt economicaly dead old coal-mining towns of PA to California.
Posted by: JosiahQ at June 20, 2003 2:09 PMMy first encounter with the word "wicked" used to mean something positive came when I moved to Philadelphia in 1978 to attend Westminster Seminary. A native Philadelphian described something as "wicked bad", by which he meant that it was exceedingly good.
Posted by: dad at June 20, 2003 2:56 PMEven further south, I distinctly remember in 1974-'75, Oklahoma City, my teenage brothers used the term as a substitution for "cool," for a few years. I didn't hear it again until I moved to Maine in the nineties, where I heard my friend's grandparents (and everyone else) using the term frequently. So it has been in New England since the '60's at least.
Posted by: J.Allred at October 8, 2005 11:05 PM