PHWOAR! He’s well fit…. Countless girls up and down the land will no doubt echo that if they cast eyes on a member of the opposite sex that catches their fancy.

But when we were teenagers we used to carelessly toss our heads in the general direction of some unsuspecting youth and say to our mates: “I fancy ‘im.”

Which might have gone down better with the likes of one Helen Fraser, the chief executive of the Girls’ Day School Trust who thinks using ‘fit’ instead of ‘fanciable’ puts girls off sport, of all things.

They should be free, she says, to ‘get pink in the face and tousled,’ without worrying. Which is actually the sort of stuff some of the less coy used to get up to behind the bike sheds with the lads from the local sixth form as well as on the hockey pitch…

I’m not sure many will take that much notice of Ms Fraser, given that her body represents just eight per cent of girls educated in independent schools in this country, while private schools themselves form roughly seven per cent of the number of four to 18-year-olds in education.

But what she says makes you wonder about why we use the words we do to express what we really mean. Like I think it’s well sick that the Tour de France whizzed through Yorkshire this weekend.

If the men in Lycra had sped over Buttertubs Pass back in the sixties I would have probably said it was fab. Or cool if they’d done it in the seventies, although being cool is still as valid today as it was then. And adults don’t sound too ridiculous if they say it unless they’re trying too hard to be cool to the point of embarrassment…

‘Sick’ of course means amazing, cool and downright awesome. But it can also mean something’s gross, vomit or puke inducing and just generally disgusting. And the trick, of course, is to work out exactly what your offspring mean when they spout it out (the word, that is, not the actual act of being sick itself…)

Even acknowledging something or someone as being cool is fraught with double meaning. Or is it? Being cool is wicked, dope, badass and crazy. But being a dope can mean you’re weedy. Or amazing. And being badass means you’re ultra-cool, not some pain in the backside…

Then there’s the word gay. I went to school with a girl called Gay and very gay she was too. As in happy, jovial and of good spirit. She might also have been gay in terms of her sexuality for all I cared but she certainly wasn’t stupid, feeble or boring. Confusing isn’t it?

The point of all this alternative language is, of course, to keep parents – or the ‘rents if you’re 16 or so – out of the loop so they haven’t a clue what their kids are on about.

It’s all part of keeping the folks at arms’ length when it suits them, even though secretly they want mum, dad or both to be wafting about in the background to put meals on the table and shirts on their back.

Though woe betide them if they try to be hip (that’s 1970s speak for cool) and join in with the teenage patois in some mistaken bid to appear in tune with their thinking. That’s really so not the done thing and just makes them roll their eyes and cringe with embarrassment. In fact, even speaking when their friends are around isn’t on. Parents should be seen and not heard…