The positive use of sick first appeared in the US in the early eighties, but didn’t emerge in British usage until relatively recently. It follows in the wake of wicked and bad, two other adjectives which have taken on a popular ‘inverted’ meaning (i.e. a meaning which represents the direct opposite of one of their other meanings). Such inverted meanings turn out to be older than you might expect – the positive use of wicked, for instance, dates as far back as 1920, when it was first used to mean ‘wonderful’ by author F. Scott Fitzgerald in his first novel This Side of Paradise.

The positive use of sick first appeared in the US in the early eighties, but didn’t emerge in British usage until relatively recently. It follows in the wake of wicked and bad, two other adjectives which have taken on a popular ‘inverted’ meaning (i.e. a meaning which represents the direct opposite of one of their other meanings). Such inverted meanings turn out to be older than you might expect – the positive use of wicked, for instance, dates as far back as 1920, when it was first used to mean ‘wonderful’ by author F. Scott Fitzgerald in his first novel This Side of Paradise.