When the Hennessey mayor used the term “boujee” in reference to erecting ginormous lighted signs and downtown directional signs during a town board meeting, the only one in the room who understood was a high school senior in the audience.

The rest of us had no idea what he meant.

I asked how to spell it.

Mayor Bert Gritz said he didn’t know, or if he was using it in the right context because he’d heard his kids use it.

Town Clerk Tiffany Tillman Googled it on her phone while Mariana Gonzalez, the teenager on the front row, said it meant “high class.”

The clerk told me how to spell it, then read that it was hip-hop slang for “something luxurious in lifestyle.”

“Totally!” thought the aging hippie in me.

That got me thinking about another slang word I keep hearing that’s bugging me. It’s “dope” and it’s used as if it’s a good thing, such as nifty, neat, cool, hip, awesome or groovy.

Way back when I was in high school in the early 1960s I remember dope meaning if you were a dope then you were stupid, a knucklehead or a doofus.

Dope, as a noun, still means drugs anyway you look at it, even in this Oklahoma climate of medical marijuana.

I’m grateful that our 70s and 80s kids still know what it means to ride shotgun, call place-backs and how to play slug bug, though I do wish my oldest daughter-from-another-mother would stop hitting me when she sees a Volkswagen Beetle. It’s not that it hurts me, it just distracts me while I’m driving..

I guess I’m just a buzz kill, and shouldn’t let new slang words like boujee (pronounced boo-gee) freak me out, but they do.

Hip-hop slang.

Rap music.

They aren’t singing. They’re talking and spitting into a microphone. That’s not music.

Holy cow! That’s probably what my folks thought about Elvis and our rock ’n roll music back in the olden days.