Not so much the cat's pajamas, daddy-o.

[mrissa]

Dear everyone older than me,

When you are writing a contemporary teen narrator, please stop having them talk about "going steady" and "necking."

It's not that today's teens don't do these things. It's that they don't call them that. With their crazy teen lingo. And if you hear them do so when they're talking to you, quite often they are trying to translate for your benefit.

My cousin A was visiting when I was telling my mother that my young friend B now has a boyfriend. "And he gave her his [activity] sweatshirt, so apparently that's a thing," I said. "Oh yah, that's a thing," said A. "It's like when you were in high school and your boyfriend would give you his letter jacket." I had to explain to the dear child that I was not of that generation in the slightest. While one of the unsuitable boys I dated in high school did, in fact, have a letter jacket, if I wanted to wear one, we both felt I could certainly earn my own.

So. Returning to the point. "Going steady." "Necking." Please. Stop.

Exasperatedly,
mrissa

Comments

[mmerriam.livejournal.com]

I figure if I need teenager slang, I know a whole mess of teenagers.

[shana.livejournal.com]

Doesn't necking mean you're going out with a vampire?

[marydell.livejournal.com]

Well I heard they got pinned! I was hopin' they would!

[marydell.livejournal.com]

I think it's assumed these days that all dating involves vampires.

[cyranocyrano.livejournal.com]

So these days, it's not 'going steady' and 'necking', it's 'a thing' and 'doing it'?
(Back in *my* day it was 'courting' and 'canoodling' because we liked the alliteration.)

[apis-mellifera.livejournal.com]

Or possibly werewolves.

[marydell.livejournal.com]

I think dating werewolves would be considered an alternative lifestyle choice.

[coraa.livejournal.com]

At Sirens, Holly Black was talking about urban legends. During her retelling of the "murderer with a hook for a hand" urban legend, the part that got the biggest laugh was when she said, "Then the young couple went parking... and you can tell how old this one is by the fact it uses the term 'parking.'"

[apis-mellifera.livejournal.com]

And who are you to deny the legitimacy of lycansexual relationships?

[hobbitbabe.livejournal.com]

In my day, nobody[*] "dated", either as "dating around" or as some descriptor of ongoing relationship. You hung out with a crowd and then one person, until after a while you were "going with" or "going out with" or "going around together". We necked a lot. Some people had sex. I put my junior athletic letter on my school cardigan, but that was a weird retro Happy-Days thing to do. (I would have earned a senior letter if we had had girls' hockey, but as it was I just barely got enough points in five years for the junior letter).

Everyone's parents tried to discourage them from exclusive relationships, saying "In my day, we dated around and had more fun." Nobody liked to ask how far they went in those non-exclusive relationships in our parents' day, but we all thought that was the main difference.

Nowadays, it seems like people make out. Also, they hook up. That might mean getting together with someone you weren't already involved with and making out with him or her, or it might mean getting together with someone you weren't previously involved with and having sex. One can't assume that someone who admits to hooking up is having sex.

[*] Having compared notes recently with people who grew up not too far away and near the same time (started university in 1979), I acknowledge that the avoidance of the word "dating" might be very localised.

[juliansinger.livejournal.com]

So what's the term lately for "going steady," anyway?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

People do, in fact, make out today! And yes, they hook up, and yes, hooking up doesn't mean as much as it might, except when it does. It's all very confusing. But hooking up doesn't mean getting in touch with someone in the sense of opening a line of communication with a platonic friend. I find myself amused and appalled when people somewhat older than me say, "Oh, I'll be in town from x-date to y-date, we should hook up then!" I know what they mean, but my gut-level reaction is, "ACK!"

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

It's sort of like when my parents' friend Vicki, who is a teacher, told her students she was looking forward to summer, when she was going to spend all week in her thongs. Students went O.O until they realized that Mrs. H. meant shoes and was talking about what they would call flip-flops. Oops.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

May vary regionally. I've heard my young friends say "going out with" or "seeing" or "dating." No steadiness involved, however.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yes. Just so.

[juliansinger.livejournal.com]

OK, so I'm not insane. ("Seeing" would generally apply for most instances I can think of.)

Going steady implies a lot of rituals that don't seem to be relevant anymore.

[coraa.livejournal.com]

When I was in college (2001-2005), "dating" was roughly equivalent to how I understand "going steady" to mean (exclusive dating, with at least some potential for a future). It generally implied exclusivity, unless you were poly. If you weren't poly but weren't exclusive, you were mostly just hanging out and/or hooking up.

I have no idea how much it's changed in the past five years.

I suspect a lot of the implications of the term "going steady" don't really apply anymore at all.

[chinders.livejournal.com]

Wow, really?

I guess I have seen books that use phrases like that, but I mostly just assume that they're older books. But now that I think about it, that's not necessarily the case- I usually place books based on the language and social context they seem to be operating in, and only very recently started actually date-checking my reading.

So now I am questioning the actual writing dates of books I read as a kid...

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

I don't actually recall people saying " going steady" in the 70s, where I wa s either

[pixelfish.livejournal.com]

See also, petting.

(I was so confused by Petting and Necking for the longest time. Seriously, WTF? Teen slang confused me even before I was a teen.)

[moiread]

It's "dating" or "together", and "making out" or "fooling around". (Where "making out" is mostly kissing in a horizontal position, and "fooling around" implies the same but with more heavy petting and other things that aren't quite PiV sex.) "Doing it" is specifically sex, and frequently "hooking up" is too, unless it's "hooking up with some friends", in which case you just mean meeting up with them.

[moiread]

Yeah. I had a whole conversation with my dad where I had to explain that "dating around" doesn't really happen so much anymore in the way it did when he was young and doing that. Most of the time now, for people under 25, you go right from being single to having an exclusive relationship. (God help you if you're a highschool girl dating two boys at once, let alone more. They will tar and feather you for being "a slut". If you're a boy doing the same with two or more girls, all the other boys will high-five you, and then the girls will find out and hate you but mostly take their anger out on each other. Viciously.)

In your mid-twenties, there's a certain amount of casual dating with multiple people, but it's kind of a weird grey area and I'm not sure it has an established name that I'm aware of. You sort of just call it "dating", like you would with an exclusive relationship, only you specify that you're "going on dates with a few guys". This is different from, but sometimes dovetails with, "hooking up", which is almost exclusively for sex. (Unless you're referring to "hooking up with some friends", in which case the fact that you specified a group means it's only the getting together to hang out kind of "hooking up", not sex.)

This baffled my dad completely, and I can't say as I blame him. Dating is a lot less casual than it was in his day, and I think it would be nice if we went back to some of that. Now it's such a serious business, and there's so much blatant misogyny involved. Not that there wasn't before, but... It would be nice if a girl could see a few different guys for fun without being lynched by her peers.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I'm 32, and the "dating two boys at once in high school = tarred and feathered as A SLUT" was the case at my high school also.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

The story that had a teenager talking this way also had him picked on for being of Middle Eastern descent (which could be a number of years) and being called "Osama." Which was pretty darn specific.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I have only seen "petting" in the context of evangelical teenage culture T-shirts saying, "Pet your dog, not your date." Which would be more hip if anybody talked about petting their date in the first place.

[zalena.livejournal.com]

When I was in high school the trend was to trade Swatch watches. Everyone always looks at me funny when I saw that one... I suspect it may have been regional.

[chinders.livejournal.com]

Um...yeah. Huh. That does not go with the 'necking' language.

Additionally, that's not going to translate after another couple of years, so unless it was really topical, I'd choose another slur.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

I think customs vary at least as much by locale as by time. I recognize much of what you say from my own high school and college years, but I think I'm probably much closer to your dad's age (born 1967).

We didn't call it dating, because no one much went on dates, at least when I was in college. (I didn't actually date in high school, so things might have been different there.) You would go out with a group of people, and you might go out to dinner with your boyfriend but that felt (to me, anyway) more like just, well, going out to dinner than like a formal date. Like, well, we have to eat, we like to go out when we can afford it and we like to eat together, not the whole thing requiring primping beforehand that you see in old movies. We used the words "with" or "being with" rather than "dating".

There was no time in my teens or twenties when my peers would have said they were dating multiple people, though there might have been multiple "friends-with-benefits" relationships that weren't really meant to be romantic.

Having co-ed dorms might have influenced the idea that spending time with the person you were 'with' was rather the default than otherwise.

[reveritas.livejournal.com]

OK, Mris. Now I want to hear about your high school dating experiences.

With me, "a thing" was to borrow each other's heavy metal band t-shirts.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I think it was meant to place the story in a very specific period, so I don't actually have as much problem with that (given that the person saying it was so vastly unsympathetic that nobody could think, "Yay ethnic slurs!"). Sometimes it's better to have your story really clearly set in 2002-2005 than to try to have it set in a "vague now-ish" that will scream 2002-2005 the minute the ball drops on 2006.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Not in high school, but I may have borrowed my first college boyfriend's surplus army shirt-jacket kind of a lot in the months we were dating.

He was about 6'3" and not a narrow-shouldered young man, so you can picture the complete look on me with either a fitted mid-90s dark colored T or else a baggy one with geeky stuff on it. And jeans and boots. Of course.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

My 20-year-old daughter's friends consider me to have been a "player" because I dated two guys at a time in my single days, and to be a "cougar" now because J is 7 years younger than I.

[kizmet-42.livejournal.com]

Yeah. This. A lot with my teens.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Hee. I hope J. is suitably amused at being cast in the role of your boy-toy at this point in your lives together.

[chinders.livejournal.com]

Yes, that's definitely true. It's interesting, though, how one tends to assume that their current set of slang is universal throughout time, no matter when the slang originated. Sort of a generalization of how people tend to apply their own mental models to everything ever, rather than thinking that others might process differently.

I find that I even do this with my past self, sort of assuming that I would have acted in a certain way, until I realize that I was a completely different person with different behaviors at that time...

[diatryma.livejournal.com]

A junior high teacher I spoke with referred to today's dating relationships as minimarriages. They make much more sense that way.

[jamiam.livejournal.com]

Where are the editors in all this? Isn't it their job to notice this and stop it before it gets out the gate?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I think the problem with a short story collection is that the short story has already been published in another form, so the editor of the collection is kind of stuck. Clearly you can correct tyops, but do you want to rewrite a story that's already appeared? That's much iffier.

Which doesn't explain the first editor, necessarily. But.

Also, when you have an established author, there's a lot more room for the author to stet things like that, things they maybe should listen to an editor on. Do you really want to get Big Name Award-Winning Author X upset with you and have them pull the story you solicited over one or two usages like that? So maybe you make the suggestion but you don't push it.

That's only my theory; I have never been Big Name Award-Winning Author X in this equation.

[cissa.livejournal.com]

I haven't reread any of the teen lit books I enjoyed as a teen- if "enjoyed" is the proper term"- in 40 or so years. Still: they were outdated THEN, and I tremble to think what today's teens would think of them; akin to Jane Austen (but less well-written), almost certainly.