The principal of a high school in Massachusetts recently banned the word meep in his school, threatening any student who used it, spoken or written, with expulsion. His rationale is that the students were using the word in a disruptive manner.
Of course they were. That is what adolescents do. Few teen pleasures are keener than getting under the skin of officious adults. And the principal, one Thomas Murray, lost composure sufficiently to forward e-mails containing meep to the local police.
Erin McKean, writing in The Boston Globe from a lexicographer’s perspective, points out that meep is the gulp of stifled panic that Beaker, the assistant in Muppet Labs, chirps as something is about to explode. Moreover, she points out: “The very sound of meep is cheering: The long-e sound forces the face into a smile (like saying cheese for a photograph), and research has shown that even a forced smile can result in an improvement in mood.”
Joy among the students must have been unconfined when word of the meep ban spread through Facebook and the news media, prompting additional lexical invention.*
Erin McKean again:
Combine a blank slate like meep and the natural tendency of English to produce new words with suffixes and affixes (and then throw in a little paronomasia, or punning) and you have plenty of scope for meep-related fun. The students (meepsters or meepers) were supposedly planning a mass-meeping, at which people might get meeped, which of course would cause meep-ruption. Meep proved to be an excellent word for expressing disapproval of the ban − “Oh, for meep’s sake,” “Read it and meep,” − although one commenter at the popular discussion site MetaFilter felt the story merited the stronger “Jesus mept,” and another picked up on a popular conspiracy-theory trope with a rousing “WAKE UP MEEPLE!”
Indulgence in meepery, it seems to me, is the kind of harmless minor anarchism that can help students endure the institutional imbecilities of the educational system, and if they can rattle some representative of tinpot authority into going meep-mad, then they have struck a blow for freedom, both lexical and personal.
*Apparently meepists outside the school began bombarding the principal with e-mails containing the odious word − not that I would give any encouragement myself to petty harassment.
How can one ban a word used by an illustrious role model like Roadrunner?
ReplyDeleteTalk about a generation thing! To me, "meep" is what the Roadrunner would say, just before speeding off into the desert, leaving behind a bewildered Wile E. Coyote. Well, perhaps his was more a "meep, meep" with added tongue-wag, but it's awfully close.
ReplyDeleteActually, I had always thought that "meep" was coined by our second cat, Flash Toby Crackit (gone but not forgotten). He never could manage a proper meow, but "meep, meep" could be heard all over the kitchen whenever the milk jug came out. (This wasn't because he was some kind of wuss, either; he cheerfully devoured entire squirrels at every opportunity.) However, if the present generation of high school students is using the word as a creative alternative to smoking blunts in order to irritate the administrators, I'm all for it.
ReplyDeleteI fear the title of this post forced me off into a research project. It was enlightening, though.
ReplyDeleteLanguage Log weighs in, with links to its previous posts on this topic:
ReplyDeletehttp://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1956#more-1956
This principal has given his students proof of the power of the spoken word.
ReplyDeleteIf only that had been his intent.
yeah its true that This principal has given his students proof of the power of the spoken word.
ReplyDeleteWait ... isn't there a story, "One Day in the Life of Yvonne d'Meepovich" ... ?
ReplyDeleteI believe she runs into Tex of the d'Thurbervilles.
(The TH is silent).
To speak, perchance to meep.
ReplyDeleteAs most students have no idea of how to use the language of their own country - this country, thank you - it's no surprise that they make up their own code. Unhappily, far too many of the wretched creatures do not improve with age or education. (When I was a teenager we were all well-versed in Op, which is not an abbreviation for Opus. We did, however, learn standard English fairly well.)
ReplyDeleteNO! That's Heidi OMeepovich!
ReplyDeletei like this sentence("even a forced smile can result in an improvement in mood.”)so keep smiling everyone.
ReplyDeleteWow. Meeps popular, why should they care if we say meep, i mean really!
ReplyDeleteme me me me meep me me me me
ReplyDelete