“Badass”: It’s not just for hipsters anymore

Adults used to make fun of kids for calling things "cool."

Now, adults call things "badass."

I heard it first from our hipster friends, I think. They'd see a particularly desirable car or motorcycle or cappuccino machine and say, "That thing is badass."

At first, I thought it was kind of badass, how they used "badass."

Then my wife and I started using the term, perhaps in order to feel a little less like the soccer parents we are (and more like badasses).

The fire caught fast. Suddenly we find ourselves calling everything we used to call "cool," "badass."

If Scout has a good game against a tough team, I tell her with an apologetic chuckle, "You played like a badass out there today." In the car on the way home, Cristie refers to the fellow soccer parent who we admire because she is a put-together college professor: "She is a badass." Then, satisfied with our badass ability to know badasses when we see them, we crank up the tunes and listen to Alicia Keys, who is just totally friggin' badass.

As a whole family unit, we are so badass, we can't even get over our badass selves.

But really, the only true badass in our family is Scout, who doesn't say "badass," ostensibly because it contains the word "ass," but really because she senses it is a sign of her parents posing as something they're not, and never were:

Badasses.

POSTSCRIPT: I sent a draft of the above post to my wife, asking her, "Is this going to ruin all the fun?" Like a badass, she replied, "It's fine. But I'm still using it."