When someone tells me they “hooked up” with Bobby Ray Smith IV on Saturday, they might as well have told me they like David Bowie in Portuguese because I have no effin’ idea what that means. It’s the most vague, useless term of late to plague the English language. And it’s all over this place.
My mother uses this term, and she doesn’t mean it – I pray to the good Lord – in the same way the average college student does. To our parents, it means to meet up with someone or to innocently get together, perhaps for lunch or a walk in the park.
“A guy sent me a text saying we should hook up later,” said Lipstick Athens. “I couldn’t believe it, then I realized that he didn’t mean it that way.”
Girls love discussing their scandalous encounters because it gives A) the teller the chance to brag and B) the friend who’s hearing about it fuel to call them a hoe behind their back within the hour. Guys love detailing it because A) it gives the teller a chance to brag.
There are times where it can really work against you. I used to have this friend who was a make-out whore, but was really good at abiding by her word to stop at third. People didn’t know this. All they knew was that she “hooked up” with that kid and unfairly concluded that she must have been a whore. A make-out whore does not make an actual whore.
“Where I come from, ‘hook up’ means sex,” some random drunk dude once told me while we stood around a trash can fire, slowly shortening our young lives and causing premature wrinkles with cancer sticks. “So I got to Davis and people were always talking about how they’d hooked up and I went around thinking, ‘Damn. People get a lot of action here.'”
I guess Mr. Dude eventually figured out that there was some miscommunication going on, because he was apparently mistaken. “Hooking up” is a term with the ambiguity to render itself nearly useless. A lot of people mean it to describe periods of osculation, but no one ever really makes it clear. Here’s where the real fail sets in. Most people can conclude that hooking up means engaging in some sort of acts that you would never, ever consider doing with your cousin. (Did you know that West Virginia has the highest incest rate in the United States? See, you did learn something in school today.)
Anyway, the tricky part is the real implication behind that. Kissing, hitting the headboard and gangbanging are all very different acts between two or more individuals. Some would argue that these acts are sacred, but really they’re probably just talking about the gangbang part. People are a little kinkier now than they used to be, so the importance of clarity is especially prudent. They like to role-play and talk dirty to each other. Example: “Okay, I’m done, get off me.” There’s a big difference between making out and doing the nasty – three whole bases.
The base system is a preferable analogy and more effective form of communication. It’s fairly well established, clearly outlined and plainly defined. Baseball is so relevant. You’d almost think this was intentional, because you can strike out. On a good night, though, you can hit a grand slam. The only part where you may run into a potential problem is when you meet people who are out of touch with the system. They may be foreign or particularly innocent, but most of the time they’re just dumb.
“We almost had sex!” Daisy Mae once told her friend, who, after a bit of conversing, figured out that by “almost had sex” ol’ Daisy meant “third base” when she only meant making out. Clearly, this girl didn’t know what she was talking about, had never heard of Wikipedia and was not fortunate enough to have pervy friends in middle school. Then again, she also thought she “had something special” with the sluttiest of mansluts, so delusion was tragically ubiquitous within her life.
If you’re not down with the base system, get down with it. Or hurry up and find a viable alternative to the heinousness that is the term “hooking up.” It needs to go. No more shall people get their facts confused. No more shall stories be translated incorrectly. Either keep it to yourself or decline to misconstrue the amount of exactly how much nookie was gotten.
MICHELLE RICK loves shouting “Wham bam! Thank you, ma’am!” at the end of Suffragette City. She wanted to spell the title “SECKS!” but her editor rejected it. Tell her it would have been better at marick@ucdavis.edu.
