"Hooking Up"

[Laurence Horn]

At 1:24 PM -0400 5/21/08, Marc Velasco wrote:
>Assuming here you mean the orign of 'hooking up' as in sexual
>encounter (since that's mostly what undergrads are interested in).
>For non-sexiness, the OED has it going back to 1925 (but even then the
>usage already predicts the transactional nature of the meaning to
>come).
>
>Places to look:
>
>** Start here: William Safire:
>http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C07E0D8153EF93BA25755C0A9669C8B63
>
>Safire dates the terms mainstreaming to 1995.
>
>Personally, I'd say the cotemporaneous drug-dealer usage (exemplified
>here by Master P) helped give the term some street cred, or currency,
>or whatever you want to call it, that helped the term 'hook-up'
>win-out over whatever other terms were competing for that meaning
>(sexual encounter) at the time.
>Master P: http://www.cduniverse.com/productinfo.asp?pid=1530461
>
>Tom Wolfe, the Charlotte Simmons novel, and apparently a collection of
>essays, neither of which I've read
>
>>>From what I've heard, Wolfe doesn't particularly focus on the origin
>of the term, but on the entire undergraduate social scene that has
>been built around the term (or at least the practice which it
>describes).
>
>I know it was popular for East Coast schools, but I'm wondering how
>much play the term got out west?
>
>That should get you started.  After that, I'd interview alums that
>went to school during the 1990's to see when it was introduced, how it
>spread.
>
It was extremely extant at Yale by the very early 1990s, to judge
from the number of its appearances in the New Words journals my
students submitted.  In a paper I published in 1993, I included this
memorable dialogue contributed by one of my undergraduates
[African-American male, if that's relevant] in response to an
assignment on what I was then calling doubles and now call lexical
clones.  (Note the ambiguity, or underspecification, of the term as
illustrated here.)

A:  Did you hook up?
B:  Yeah, we hooked up.
A:  Did you hook UP hook up?
B:  No, we just hooked up hooked up.

LH

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