"Hook up" = have casual sex?

[Benjamin Zimmer]

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.

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."
-----


--Ben Zimmer

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