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The Keep your English up to date podcast from BBCLearningEnglish.com in this week's program, John Ato explains the origin, meaning and use of the word edgy.
Edgy.
If there's any word that needs to be up to date fashionable and cool, it's a word that means up to date.
Fashionable, cool.
What could be more passe, more naff than an old word for new?
Well, actually, what goes around can sometimes come around.
Cool itself is a good example.
In the 1940s and 50s, it was the height of verbal fashion.
It then went through a long period out of favour when it seemed so last generation.
And now, of course, it's right back in fashion.
But many of its synonyms are irrevocably on the scrap heap, trendy, with it happening where it's at.
Where are they now?
So what is the latest fashionable word?
Its edgy.
Now, the idea behind edgy is that the edge is the most forward part of something, the place where new things are happening, where the future is becoming the present.
We talk too of innovation taking place at the leading edge or at the cutting edge, so the imagery is quite familiar.
One slight problem is that historically, edgy has long meant something completely different anxious, nervous, on edge.
But we can cope with words that have multiple meanings.