Freaking
You can stop sending me messages about
freaking and
freak dancing. Freaking
(usually called freak dancing,
apparently) clearly belongs on the list of
lewd
behavior at a school dance, as a dozen or so correspondents have
patiently explained to me. There was a
NYT
article yesterday about freak dancing (banned in Manlius, New
York), and five years ago even Bill O'Reilly
took
notice of it; there are references to it all over the place.
Pelvic thrusting is involved.
On the rest of the items in the
Zits
list, there's less agreement.
(
Freak(
ing) might be an echo of
fuck(
ing). It is, after all, a
common avoidance substitute for the tabooed
fuck(
ing).)
To refresh your memory: I divided the list of 16 items into three sets:
words (like
bumping) I
recognized as referring to behavior that would be considered lewd at a
high school dance; words (like
moshing)
I recognized as referring to other sorts of activities that might be
considered inappropriate there, because they are aggressive or
dangerous; and words (like
pronking
and
knurling) that I was just
dubious about. Remember that the activities in question were
presented in the cartoon as being specifically
LEWD,
not just inappropriate, so that even the items in group 2 are somewhat
problematic. I was aware of
freaking
in a drug context, but had somehow missed the dirty-dancing sense (no
one can be on top of everything in every part of every culture; we all
miss things). Now it turns out that some of the other words have
drug-related senses, according to Ben Lavender:
rolling and
mashing as well as
freaking. I have no idea how
widespread these terms are.
Several correspondents suggested that I should have consulted the Urban
Dictionary site, where I would have found, for example, sexual
definitions for
mash: 'to
have sex', 'to engage in sexual foreplay or heavy petting' (hat tip on
this one to Elise Stickles). I've found the Urban Dictionary very
frustrating to use. You can get no sense of how widespread a
usage is; some entries are likely to be reports of items used by only a
few friends on very specific occasions, and some might be sheer
exuberant inventions. And the definitions (provided by ordinary
people, not lexicographers) are often hard to interpret. In
addition, they are from all over the English-speaking world; many are
clearly British or Australian, but most of the time you can't be
sure. Ben Judson pointed me to the Urban Dictionary entries for
pronk and
sledging,
as well as
mash and
freak, and they are typically
problematic.
All four versions of
pronk
seem to be inventions: 'a joke involving someone else's genitalia' (a
play on
prank); a style of
music (portmanteau of
prog
and
rock); 'a person who
likes rock, punk and some pop' (another portmanteau); and the nickname
of baseball player Travis Hafner (yet another portmaneau: "It stands
for 'half project, half donkey.' ").
For
sledging there's one
definition that's clearly not American ('to protrude your jaw outwards
whilst rolling your eyes back into your head', with a puzzling exemplar
that doesn't contain the word but does contain the vocative
lad) and two from Australian
cricket slang.
Nothing relevant here, nor anything relevant for
wallow,
knurl, or
squean. (Derry Earnshaw notes
that the OED has an entry for
squean,
but from the early 17th century and in an irrelevant sense.)
Most of my correspondents, including some who are in fact teenagers,
agreed with my breakdown of the list, except for
freaking. But Laura Petelle
reports that
Pronking and knurling are spastic dance
moves. (Pronking I assume from the springbok antelope's similar
movements, although may be just because it's a cool-sounding word;
knurling I don't know the origin of but I think the move comes from
street dancing post-breakdancing. Both are after my time.)
Mashing was a dance move when I was in high school but it was part of
house dancing; I think it means something different now. I don't know
wallowing, but I've heard my teenaged brother use sledging.
It's not clear to me why any of these moves should be banned at school
dances.
In any case, the picture that emerges is that most of these words --
wallowing and
squeaning are still unattested with
relevant meanings -- have been used, by at least some teenagers on some
occasions, to refer to dancing or sexual display or both, and some have
been used to refer to drug use. But most of them are scarcely
widespread, and it's unlikely that any single teenager has ever had the
relevant uses for all 14 of the currently attested items. Petelle
thinks that
Zits is unusually
accurate in its portrayal of teenagers. It is certainly
sympathetic to them, but it often takes the viewpoint of baffled
adults. In fact, we've pointed out before (
here
and
here)
that the cartoon sometimes offers stereotypes of teenage
behavior. In the latest case, I still think that there's a lot of
sheer invention going on, rather than keen observation of the actual
adolescent world.
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at December 18, 2006 01:25 PM