Sick, Brah: The Ineloquence Of Talking About The Outdoors (from semi-rad.com)

I spent two hours this morning without a shirt pulling on plastic rocks screwed into boards canted out fifty degrees in a small room on the fifth story of an old, beat up building in downtown Laramie with my Thailand-bound climbing partner Ken (also shirtless). In those two hours of chalk, sweat, and demon snarls I expressed a vocabulary not exceeding fifty words, with the three most frequent being "rad", "gnar", and "sick".

Ken is a graduate student in French, I'm a hobbyist linguist seventh-year college student, and I feel both of us would rank "conversating" intelligently not too far under climbing on our list of Things We Enjoy. What I'm saying is, there's no excuse for the way we talk when we're "getting our bro on", as it were. We discussed our habit of bro-speak (and in particular, a growing fear that the word "gnar" was working its way into every-day life) during noontime coffee, and later in the day he sent me an email with the link I'm putting below.

Next time you’re standing around a campfire, count the number of friends you have who are smart enough to potentially climb the corporate ladder, but dumb enough to climb mountains for “fun,” able to talk in the jargon of business, but prefer to talk in the dialect of radness, at least on weekends. You probably know lots of people like that. Or maybe you are people like that.

via Sick, Brah: The Ineloquence Of Talking About The Outdoors | semi-rad.com.