"Hook up" = have casual sex?

[Laurence Horn]

At 4:01 PM -0500 1/26/06, Benjamin Zimmer wrote:
>On 1/26/06, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>  On 1/26/06, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
>>  >
>>  > At 11:23 AM -0500 1/26/06, Wilson Gray wrote:
>>  > >Till now, I've thought of a "hook-up" as a real relationship that
>>  > >includes sex and not as a term that includes random acts of casual sex
>>  > >within a "friendship with privileges." Perhaps I need to get out more.
>>  >
>>  > Or lurk among undergraduates.  Students have been supplying this as a
>>  > term of art for several years in my new words lexicon--suggesting
>>  > that this use of "hook-up" is one they encounter when they come to
>>  > Yale (who says education isn't broadening?).  My favorite cite
>>  > demonstrating both the wider and narrower use of the term is this
>>  > exchange, old enough for me to have noted it in a paper I published
>>  > in 1993:
>>
>>  Aw, geez, Lar. Prior to 1993?! Damn! I'm way older than I thought I was. ;-)
>
>See also cites listed in the HDAS entry for "hook up" (1c). Connie
>Eble's "Campus Slang" series glossed "hook up (with)" as "become
>amorously involved with a person...for at least the duration of the
>evening" in 1988, and as "meet someone, often for the purpose of
>noncommital sex" in 1989.

Yeah, I think that's about when it began showing up in my students'
course journals here as well.

>
>A New York Times article from Jan 2, 1991 ("When Does 'No' Mean
>'No'?", p. B8) provides a gender-based interpretation:
>
>-----
>At Lehigh, for example, "at certain fraternity houses, when the girl
>goes upstairs, the guys start licking their chops," said Brett Finn, a
>Lehigh junior."There is a real miscommunication."
>Even student slang means different things to men and women, Mr. Finn
>said. "Hooking up' to a man means having sex," he said. "But to a
>woman it means kissing or fondling. Males and females can't seem to
>get together."
>-----
>
Very nice.  Somehow, when "miscommunication" is brought up, I've
never really thought of licking one's chops as a locus classicus.  Of
course the gender-based discrepancies on what counts as 'hooking up'
is also reminiscent of all the studies that came out during the
latter part of the Clinton years on what counts as 'having sex'.

Larry

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