Is Miami a Cool Place?

The answer to my title depends on how you define "cool". This week during AIS we discussed connotations and denotations of words. There are many words that have one predominant meaning, but also have one or more second, less known meaning. Mr. O’Connor mentioned the work “killer” in his blog. This got me thinking about some other words I use today that an outsider would look at and wonder what the hell I was talking about. One word is cool. I remember watching a documentary last year in geography about some African teenage boys visiting the USA for their first time. When they told their cab driver at the Miami airport that it was their first time in America, the cab driver said “cool”. Since the African teenagers had never heard the word “cool” used like this before, they replied “No, not really.” This is one example of words with multiple meanings
Another idea that has multiple words to describe it is when two or more friends meet to do activities together. When I was a child, I called this a “play date”. “Play date” is probably the most accurate description, because we are playing video games, a sport, or something else, and it is on a specific date. When boys and girls started dating, we no longer called it a “play date”. It was now called “hanging (out)”. I can see how this would make no sense to an outsider. If I asked someone new to America if they “wanted to hang with me”, they might think I wanted to commit suicide with them, which is very far from what I wanted to do. Also, there is the word “chill”. I could ask the same person if they wanted to “chill”, and they might ask me what’s so fun about sitting in a refrigerator and getting cold. Maybe when I get to college I’ll be asking friends if they want to salmon together. That means nothing to us now, but it might in five or ten years. It seems that the older I get, the words that I use become more bizarre. Is that a common trend?