One last squean and knurl
A while ago I
reported
on a
Zits cartoon
featuring guidelines for a high school dance, titled:
Winter Mixer guidelines
Provocative dress and lewd behavior are prohibited
and proscribing the following list of activities:
Grinding, bumping, moshing, mashing,
licking, squeaning, shoving, sledging, rolling, kicking, wallowing,
freaking, pronking, booty dancing, fondling, and whole- or half-body
knurling will not be permitted.
In tracking down this vocabulary I eventually
extended
my search from lewd behavior to take in other sorts of behavior
that would be out of place at a school dance, in particular drug
use. Still, some of the items looked suspicious (while others
were clearly genuine), and the whole list seemed jokey -- definitely
entertaining, in fact -- rather than like a report on current teen
vocabulary.
Eventually
squean (the noun)
was
traced
to the world of cartoonists. Now I have a final report on the
Zits vocabulary list, including
some information from one of the cartoonists.
E-mail, in the order of its arrival:
From our own Ben Zimmer, links to his
ADS-L
postings
of a year ago on the history of
freak
dancing /
freaking.
I'm hoping Ben will post a bit here on the topic.
From Idris Mercer, a link to the 11/19
Mark Trail strip, about
antelopes and their inclination to pronk, and a link to the
comments section
at Comics Curmudgeon, where occasional comments about the delights of
the verb
pronk began springing
up.
From Jake Schneider, identifying
rolling
as associated with Ecstasy use
From Keith Handley, providing the link between
squean and comics, already reported
on. Since then, I've checked Mort Walker's
The Lexicon of Comicana to verify
that the squean is in there. But neither the knurl nor knurling
is.
From Russell Borogove, suggesting a possible relationship between
knurling and the game of
knurdling,
a.k.a. bottle walking, described as follows:
Mark a line on the floor, and stand
behind the line with a beer bottle in each hand. Ensuring that your
feet remain behind the line, "walk" forward with the bottles in your
hands, and plant one of the bottles upright as far from the line as you
can manage. Then, using the remaining bottle only, "walk" back to the
line and return to your standing position, still ensuring that your
feet remain behind the line.
Not something for a high school dance, I'd think, but probably not
relevant here, especially in the context of "whole- or half-body
knurling". [Addendum: also check out
nurdle at
Grant Barrett's Double Tongued site (thanks to Ben Zimmer).]
And then, from Brad Skaggs, a report on an e-mail exchange with the
cartoonists who draw
Zits.
Skaggs specifically asked about squeaning and knurling. Jim
Borgman responded with delight at the attention of linguists -- but
without an answer to Skaggs's question. He did say that "most of
the terms came straight off a note sent home by my teenage daughter's
high school principal in advance of a homecoming dance", adding that he
and Jerry Scott embellished the list some, "but not always where your
linguists suspected" (though he doesn't identify which items were their
embellishments).
This would be a good time to stop searching for the sources of the
words on the list. I suspect that quite a few people were playing
around here: the principal's sources (presumably teenagers at the
school), maybe the principal himself, and certainly Scott and
Borgman. The overall effect of the list is an entertaining
avalanche of words, some familiar, some puzzling. They might all
be teen slang, somewhere, sometime.
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at January 2, 2007 02:07 PM