Thanks for your patience during our recent outage at scalar.usc.edu. While Scalar content is loading normally now, saving is still slow, and Scalar's 'additional metadata' features have been disabled, which may interfere with features like timelines and maps that depend on metadata. This also means that saving a page or media item will remove its additional metadata. If this occurs, you can use the 'All versions' link at the bottom of the page to restore the earlier version. We are continuing to troubleshoot, and will provide further updates as needed. Note that this only affects Scalar projects at scalar.usc.edu, and not those hosted elsewhere.
12019-10-21T17:09:30-07:00Hankins Feichter4cce6cb584a3e5057ce8981a6ea7dff6489ff85b353375plain2019-10-21T20:10:45-07:00Hankins Feichter4cce6cb584a3e5057ce8981a6ea7dff6489ff85bOriginally signifying something evil or corrupt (originating from wicca, an Old English word for witch), that which was "wicked" soon became that which was cool. 19th century records show writers using the word as an adverbial synonym for "really" or "very".
From the 1960s through the 1980s, the word came to mean something else entirely. Emanating from Boston out into the rest of the United States, the slang word became a fixture of the English speaking world.