Wicked rad

Towards the end of my high school time i had a pin on which “Get Radical!” stood. I think i got it at some thrift store in South Dakota. I liked this pin a lot, because it was political and aesthetic – attributes that are typically not used to describe the same thing. While i saw the green lettering on beige background as a charming plea to consider the root of the mess we’re in, some of my peers read it as incitement to crude and dull activism. Recently i discovered that an abbreviation of radical, namely rad, now seems to be the hip way of saying that something is cool and awesome (at least among certain English speaking North Americans). As i am temporarily residing in Cambridge/Boston, a localized version of that may be “wicked rad” – however, i am not sure if native/local speakers would agree…