Word Talk

Talking About Words: Squatchetery

With Prof. Richard Bailey

Nothing dates alumni so much as the slang they picked up in college.

An archaeologist carefully brushing away the silt from a prehistoric kitchen midden can look downward into deep time, descending from nails to spear points to fire-hardened sticks. Today’s students are embarrassed by a parent who says groovy and intrigued, in a patronizing way, at the grandparent who says swell. Their turn will come when their children smirk at them when they say awesome.

In the 1895-96 school year, a teacher in the rhetoric course at Michigan, Willard Clark Gore, collected nearly a thousand slang terms used by students. He published portions of the list in a Michigan magazine, The Inlander, and thus afforded us hints about the way students talked more than a century ago.

Some of these expressions are entirely familiar today. Students might flunk a quiz in psych or math and afterwards complain to the prof.
But 21st-century students would be at a loss to communicate with their 19th-century counterparts at the corner of State Street and North University Avenue.

Imagine, in 1895, a brick approaching that corner. Let our present-day student appear suddenly and approach the brick who is salamandering along the sidewalk.

Our time-traveler would see at once that this handsome stroller is phat candy. Soon the brick hails a passing co-ed: “Those togs are squatchetery.” Entirely bewildered, our traveler squints at The Inlander and finds: “Your new gown is decidedly squatchetery.” That example sentence is accompanied by a definition: “admirable, pleasing.”

Most of the expressions Gore published are long forgotten: a chiselly day was a cold, overcast, blustery one; a skinchy piece of pie was a stingy slice; collegers at the varsity might be blug (stylish) or skatey (the opposite of blug).

Our visitor would be bewildered by very ideas encased in the slang of the day: hen-medic for a woman in medical school (as opposed to a man-medic), some of them homeops (“students in the homeopathic department’).

No longer do hashlets (boarders) put themselves through college by work as a “k. m.” (dishwasher < kitchen mechanic). No longer would an especially admired freshlet or soph be described as right as a rabbit.

The initialisms would simply overwhelm our visitor. “What does n. g. mean?” she might ask.

“No good,” replies the brick.

“What’s a plunk?”

“D. Y. W. Y. K.,” says the impatient brick. (Only later by searching in Gore’s list would our visitor learn that a plunk is a dollar and D.Y.W.Y.K. means “Don’t you wish you knew?”)

Our 21st-century student was flummoxed by the 19th-century one and ended up feeling like a yup (“a person of inferior ability,” according to Gore).

So to prepare our 19th-century fox for a 21st-century comeuppance, I have made a small inquiry into the slang at Michigan today.
More about that next time.

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