Who taught: Chris and Danny

Dapper Justin Bieber (source: http://www.thehollywoodgossip.com/)

From time to time, I visit tech startups with my colleagues and have conversations about any possible partnership between the program that I belong to as a faculty member and the companies.

About 10 days ago, Tami and I visited one cool startup in Pittsburgh which is specialized in mobile application development. As we get into the office, one thing we noticed was that all of the people were wearing business attires or suits. We felt that we were underdressed. Chris who is one of the co-founders of the company came down, a few minutes later, and told us why they are wearing nice.

He said, “Don’t worry! Today is Pretty Friday! Employees are supposed to wear cloths to make them prettier.” After a very productive meeting with him, I came back to my office. Not surprisingly, he also updated his company’s status on Facebook saying, “Pretty Friday! Branders are looking dapper today.”

To be honest, I had no idea what “dapper” means even though I could easily figure out that it must be something good. I was thinking, “hmm… is it the comparative form of ‘dap’ or what?”

As I was looking it up in a dictionary, I remembered another word my friend Danny used a long time ago. Before I talk about another word, what is dapper?

Neat and trim in dress or appearance, typically of a man.

So, yeah.. it is a good word to use.

In a very similar situation, Danny used a different word. At that time, he and I were students at CMU and we were in different teams for final projects. On the last day of the projects, we all had to give presentations and demos about what we had done. To give a better impression to judges, we all wore suits. When we met in an elevator, he said to me, “Oh, you look very slick today.” Similar to dapper’s case, I did not know what slick means at that time but was able to decode what he meant.

Now, I think I have at least two words to say whenever I see my friends wearing suits or very neat business attires.

One big difference between these two words is that slick can be used for broader subjects than dapper. For example, if you want to buy an iPad 2, you could say to your wife, “Honey, you should see it. It is so slick.” Oh.. you want to buy a BMW?? Then, you can definitely persuade your wife by saying, “A new 2012 BMW is very slick. The best thing is that it makes you look even slickier when you drive it.”