Slang words from the ’90s that would embarrass you if you used them today
Stuart Scott yelled it on ESPN. Budweiser stretched it into three syllables. A teen movie gave it a hand gesture. Each was a normal thing to say in the 1990s, and each now makes a room go quiet.
Five phrases below, with the specific places they came from.
Two sitcoms spent years mocking anyone who kept saying “Whassup”
The ad first aired during Monday Night Football in December 1999, and it’s frequently misremembered as a Super Bowl debut, though it did get a famous slot after Super Bowl XXXIV’s halftime show in 2000. It grew out of a short film called True, written and directed by Charles Stone III and starring his real friends, and a team at the ad agency DDB talked Budweiser into hiring Stone and the whole group. The campaign ran through 2002. Friends and The Office both took their shots at people who kept the catchphrase going, and by the time the sitcoms joined in, the people still shouting it were the joke.
A bamboo-chair maker in Winston-Salem yelled it first
Stuart Scott’s memoir traces “Boo-yah” to a neighbor known as Mr. G, who built bamboo chairs and once used the word to describe how loud the previous night’s thunder had been. It became shorthand among Scott’s friends for a blast of energy, and later a fixture of SportsCenter. In 1999, Saturday Night Live aired a parody with Tim Meadows playing Scott, including a line about bringing your own “Boo-yah.” Once SNL gets there, a phrase has usually peaked.
1989 for “all that”; 1994 for the bag of chips
The Oxford English Dictionary traces “all that” to 1989, but the full phrase doesn’t show up in print until a 1994 issue of People magazine. Depending on tone, it could be a straight compliment or a sarcastic jab, and “she thinks she’s all that” was never praise. Five years to add the chips, and a few more before nobody wanted them.
Baldwin
Clueless launched it as slang for an attractive man, named for the acting brothers who were everywhere in the mid-1990s. Introduce a date as a Baldwin now and expect a confused question about which one.
Why did one word need its own hand gesture?
Clueless also popularized “whatever,” including the gesture that went with it, a dismissive motion that did half the work of the sentence. The film leans on Valley speak, a dialect tied to affluent teens in California’s San Fernando Valley. A Northeastern linguist told NPR that people still debating its slang is a reminder that “slang is a part of our everyday human experience.” Say the word today and it still works. Add the hand motion and watch everyone check their phones.
The bottom line
Nobody was embarrassed by these phrases in 1996. The embarrassment arrived later, with the sitcom jokes, the SNL sketches, and a generation of coworkers who weren’t there.
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