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yellowstuff

"Smooth" is definitely still current slang, with a meaning similar to "cool." And "smooth" came first:

> Slang meaning "superior, classy, clever" is attested from 1893. Sense of "stylish" is from 1922.

> A 1599 dictionary has smoothboots "a flatterer, a faire spoken man, a cunning tongued fellow."

It may be time to bring that one back. "Did you see Keith chatting up that girl at the bar? Total smoothboots."

https://www.etymonline.com/word/smooth

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I would say the 1599 sense more accurately reflects the current sense of "smooth" than the 1893/1922 citations do.

Sophisticated used to mean false, as in sophistry: with intent to deceive. So a sophisticated wine, was an adulterated wine, that had something other than fermented grape juice in it.

TIL. I was quite surprised that sophistication used to mean deceptive/misleading behavior.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophistication

"Sophistry" still does.

"Silly" is the standard example of semantic shift over what people generally perceive to be a pretty extreme distance: https://www.etymonline.com/word/silly

Or water, presumably?

To the Romans, drinking wine merum (pure) was a sign of barbarity. They drank their wine diluted.

I don't see a mention of "sophisticated" above - was this just a fun fact?

Roman wine was very strong, around 15-20% ABV. No wonder they added water to it (and sometimes lead as a sweetener).

I've never heard anyone use smooth the way everyone uses cool.

I second this. Linguistics and "slang" is pretty interesting in its own right. I believe that "cool" is more universally used. Usually smooth is used to describe an action that someone did, not really heard it being used in place of "cool".

(under 30 male, west coast USA perspective)

I tend to agree, smooth is IME also usually (but definitely not entirely) used sarcastically, when someone does something accidentally silly, like bumping into a glass door or similar.

(over 30 male, NZ)

"cool" appears in Shakespeare and in the Coventry Christmas Play with the same meaning it's used for today.

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