"'Sweet'? - Yuck!"

I guess it's hip to use the word "sweet" now, but the problem for me is that it's not something new and cool, but something old and disgusting!  I still remember my older female relatives who would refer to anything insipid by saying "Oh, now isn't that sweet?".  Uggghhh!  Yuck!  It makes me sick to remember it!  So every time I get an e-mail from someone in their twenties now and they use the generational code word "sweet", I have a gag reflex and see visions of old women with too much perfume cooing about how "sweet" kittens and babies are!

But wait a minute - I get it - it's the twenties again!  The bored "opinion leaders" and "fashion" writers probably dusted off some old magazines from the twenties and figured:

"What the h**l, most people who were alive in the 1920's are dead now - so they won't/can't complain if I steal their fashions, 'trends', and vocabulary and call it something new!  From the other end, people in their twenties (now... they can't stay there) haven't a clue about the nineteen-twenties, so they'll think they're being hip as they use the old dusty words and fashions, and - best of all - they'll make me rich in the process!  Ho-Ho-Ho!! Ha-Ha-Ha-Ha-Ha!!!"

I mean... let's be honest here.  Every old person was once young and every young person who doesn't die young will get old.  100% of us die sooner or later - there is no eternal youth and - the "We're in the same group, ho-ho!" usefulness of generational code words aside - words are only tools and... and... wait a second... this is degenerating into sophistry....

Well - I just wanted to complain about that really horrible, disgusting, insipid, nasty word "sweet".  Man I hate that word!  I guess that makes it a perfect generational code term - "Say it and watch middle-aged Lyle gag! He-he!", but if I could only bring those old relatives of mine back to life to blast the ears off those in their twenties now with the insipid version of "sweet", they would cover their ears in horror and run away screaming when they heard the word!

Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon
http://www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/