"hook up with"

[Ben Zimmer]

On Wed, Jan 16, 2013 at 7:42 PM, Laurence Horn wrote:
>
> OK, now I do have access to my HDAS II, and I see that Jon's first specifically
> sexual cite for _hook up (with)_ = 'become amorously involved with a person…
> for at least the duration of the evening…"Did you hook up with Debbie last night?"'
> is provided (with that gloss) in the 1988 edition of Connie Eble's _Campus Slang_.
> I'm pretty sure it was around before then at Yale and probably elsewhere, although
> the exact nature (or degree) of the activities engaged in between the amorous
> involver/involvee pair can sometimes be…well, underspecified.  Which is where
> the clones below come in handy.  Unfortunately I would need to find my students'
> word journals from the late 1980s to confirm how early this had popped up around
> here, and they're buried under decades of detritus.  (Nominalized _hook-up_ with the
> relevant meaning is first attested in HDAS in Terri McMillan's 1987 _Breaking Ice_.)

FWIW, when we discussed this, um, seven years ago, you thought that
1988 was about when "hooking up" started showing up in your students'
journals:

http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0601D&L=ADS-L&P=R9568&I=-3

I'd say it was definitely in use at Yale when I arrived as an
undergrad in '88 -- can't speak to earlier years. (And sadly, though I
did take transformational grammar with Larry, I missed out on his
"Words" class, so I never kept a journal.)

--bgz

--
Ben Zimmer
http://benzimmer.com/

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