What was "Cool" in your generation?

we used hip to talk about who was High In Public without the old folks knowing what was up (as if)...

Oh yeah. Tough, I'm hip, outta sight, dynamite, slick, it's coming back to me now.

Are children of the 80's old enough to comment here?

I heard "dope" a lot in high school, but it never rubbed off on me. I tended to say "sweet". I knew someone who used to say "kosher" but only in a negative sense ("that's not kosher"), and for some reason that did rub off on me. I knew some guys who were trying to emulate classic rock figures who said "rad".

Eoe mentioned "slick" - I did hear and use that, but only sarcastically. Of course, I'm part of the generation who probably named Slick Willy....

Cool -"intense" as in s/he, an experience whatever was "so intense, man."

The opposite of cool was "beat". "That class is so beat" meant "that class sucks."

Just a few degrees hotter and the water in your body would boil. Ouch.

That's interesting. I had never heard "beat" used quite that way. I am, after all, a member of the Beat Generation (Jack Kerouac, Lawrence Ferlenghetti, Alan Ginsburg etc. etc.).

Andrew - It may have been a regional thing. I grew up in suburban New Jersey and was a teen through the seventies. When I went to college in North Carolina and used "beat" to describe something I didn't like, I got really puzzled looks. No one there had ever heard it used that way either.

I grew up in the 70's so it was

refer
stogie
doobie

rufio, that's interesting. When I was a kid, slick meant cool, like a slick car, but I can also remember my mother referring to someone as being 'slick as coon ****' which of course meant not very cool at all.

Cool?

A gold cigarette lighter that lit first time every time when you produced it for an impatient lady.The hots came later.

My normal temperature is 97.4, so you're just a little cooler than me. But my skin is warm in the winter and cool in the summer, so what does that make me?

After consulting a friend of my age I gotta add "stoer", "gaaf" (argh - I know that word was around everywhere, but I'm pretty sure we didnt ever use it) and, for those from Brabant, "kei-".

Far out (man). Has that been mentioned? Though I suspect Cheech and Chong did it to death. But people did say it...

Cool has been cool, though it died out for a while.
Neat was an early sixties word for a kind of cool.
I remember the first time I heard the word 'hip'; my boss said it. I thought he was getting the word 'hep' wrong.

I've spent years and years trying to excise the word 'darling' from my braincells. It still comes out as a descriptive when I've too tired to monitor it. (Ewwwwwww!) My mother and aunt used to say it, usually about clothes.

I don't remember rad or awesome ever passing my lips.
I think I've said fantastic too many times.

Speaking of "neat": I remember it from being a kid in the '50s and then dying out, but when I moved West in '74, I heard it said in Eugene, OR. At first I though it was tongue in cheek, but no. A last bastion of "neat," I guess.

I have some connection in my memory that it was related to preppy ways.

It was sometime in the very early 60s that "hep" became "hip." I recall overhearing a brief conversation at the time between a female colleague and our supervisor. He said, "I guess you think you're real hep." To which she replied, demurely, "Hep enough to know that the word is 'hip' not 'hep'."

Excellent.

"Slick as coon ****"! I'm using that one.

80's kid, so all the stuff mentioned here -- the ones I probably actually used the most were sweet, awesome, and cool. Still use awesome too much.

Awsome, bitchin, cool, dude.... wicked preceded lots of words. Some usage of rad, diss, groovy, freaky.....