And from the 1950s to the present day, their sworn enemies were probably known by a greater diversity of names: the “smokers,” the “greasers,” the “scrubs” (kids in vocational classes, also known as “shop kids” or “shop rats”), and “shrubs” (who are also known as “rockers,” “metalheads,” “bangers,” “Hessians,” or “heshers”), as well as an assortment of “burnouts,” “skaters,” “punks,” “emos,” “hippies,” “goths,” “stoners” (who were known at one West Hartford, Conn., school in the early 1980s as “the double door crowd” because they hung out in the school’s entryway) and “taggers,” a relatively recent term for graffiti vandals. (...)
There’s a lot that adults end up speculating about when it comes to high school crowd labels. Why do they change? How much do they vary from place to place? Where do new ones come from? Some labels, like “jocks,” stand the test of time, while others (“emos,” “wiggers”) rise with clothing styles and musical subgenres, and as much as one might like to imagine some high school in a tiny valley that time forgot where “greasers” battle “bebops,” those labels are no more. Obviously, American society changes, and mass media reinforce some names. But experts say that when they go back to schools they’ve studied before, they find that the crowd labels have been refreshed by some inscrutable linguistic tide.
I credit my son’s babysitter for getting me interested in crowd labels and clique names when she told me that the popular kids at her school were the “windswept hair people.” I thought, surely teen social landscapes have interesting names and rich naming practices like “windswept hair people.” But for the most part, as far as I’ve been able to tell, the labels don’t vary much, and if creative names exist, they’re not easy to hear about. Over the decades up until now, studious college-bound kids are usually known as “brains,” “brainiacs,” “nerds,” “geeks,” “eggheads,” or “the intelligentsia.” I collected high school names using Twitter and Survey Monkey and came across “crumbsters,” a label for the popular kids, and the “queer cult,” for the semi-populars, though if awards were given out for creative crowd labels, the kids at one New Jersey high school in the mid-2000s might win for naming their popular crowd in the aftermath of a food fight that happened in ninth grade, when one of the most popular girls shrieked and generally overreacted after she was hit in the face with a flying chicken patty. The popular kids became known as “chicken patties.” Depending on where and when you went to high school, you might have called them “preps,” “socialites,” “Ivy Leaguers,” “soshes,” or simply “the popular kids.”
Those four crowds—jocks, smart kids, popular kids, and deviants—are said by adolescent researchers to be standard in American high schools. Then there’s a grab-bag group: kids into drama and band (“drama fags,” “band fags,” “drama geeks,” “band geeks,” etc.), as well as “gang bangers,” “girly girls,” “cholos,” “Asian Pride” (and other racial and ethnic groups, like “FOBs”—a derogatory term referring to recent immigrants), “Gay Pride,” and depending on the region “plowjocks” (also ag students, or “aggies,” “hicks,” “cowboys,” and “rednecks”) and “Wangsters” (who are “wannabe” gangsters). At a highly selective residential public school from the middle of the U.S., upper-middle-class ethnic students were known as “teen girl squad” and “teen jerk squad,” while the mainly white, rural students were known as “second floor boys and girls,” because of where they lived in a dorm. (...)
The relative stability and blandness of certain crowd labels may have something to do with what kids need labels for (and they do need them—more about that in a bit). Basically, Brown said, once you leave the enclosed classroom of the elementary school, “you have a bigger sea of humanity that needs to be navigated without much oversight or guidance.” New middle-schoolers and high-schoolers now have to deal with far more people than they can have individual relationships with. You need some way to make sense of who might be a friend and who might be an enemy. And communicating about where you think you and others belong only works if your crowd labels are conventional enough for people to understand. I don’t know what a “grater” is, but I know what a “band nerd” is.
You can tell a lot about the social uses of crowd labels from their absence. For instance, people who went to smaller high schools don’t report having crowd labels. It’s not that they were closer-knit, it’s that the school’s population was closer to the number of individual social relationships the human brain can process (called Dunbar’s Number, it ranges between 100 and 130). Also, the first teenage crowd labels in America date to a 1942 study by August Hollingshead (who reported three labels: “elites,” “good kids,” and “the grubby gang”). Not until the 1940s were there a lot of high schools large enough to be all-encompassing social worlds.
by Michael Erard, TMN | Read more:
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