Today a departure: I’m required by law to post something substantive o’er on MySpace, but since I realize I’m likely to be snowed in for the next 36 hours or so, I thought I’d get my work on. Accordingly, today’s mischief will double as a sample for my English 201H students, who have been asked to complete an ongoing informal writing assignment I’ve called the semantic survey.
We’re going to take a long look at the way words mean, the work they do, their applications, functions, and limitations. Accordingly, after the asterisks interested parties may see just one specimen of the kind of writing I have in mind for the survey itself–a paragraph or two that dwells on the semantics of a newish entry into the lexicon, an entry that might come from a source as authoritative as the Oxford English Dictionary, an open-source forum like Urban Dictionary, or even the writer’s own personal vernacular. Today’s entry: the most important lexical innovation of the 21st century.
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Today I shall talk of clownsnacks and clownsnackery, two terms that I’ve adopted and adapted to my own language. I’ve struggled to make clownsnack “happen,” in the parlance of Mean Girls, but a half dozen former students of mine recognize its crucial place in American culture.
Clownsnack has a fairly transparent etymology: it comes from Rollergirls, a documentary series that once aired on A&E chronicling the lives and times of several roller derby skaters down in Texas. One of the bit players was a woman who had taken up the sobriquet “Clownsnack” (here, in fact, is the skater in question), and in one episode she explained the origin of the name. It seems she was out with her friends and, for reasons that are never fully discussed, a clown in full makeup spent much of the evening leering at her from across a bar–which she found both creepy and titillating. As a result, clownsnack in my usage has come to mean “a woman who routinely attracts undesirable men of all stripes.” Clownsnackery, by extension, is the manifestation of such desire by the clowns themselves.
Part of the reason I’m enamored with this term is that it serves multiple functions. For male users (in contexts like “Gee willikers, Olga is going out with Bjorn this weekend; she’s such a clownsnack”), it performs at least two operations: it separates the speaker from the clowns in question, and it also offers a peculiar kind of comfort when a woman desired by the speaker takes up with just such a clown. The logic of clownsnack suggests that something intrinsic in her makes her attractive to clownfolk, so of course she would eventually wind up with one. For women, by extension, the use of clownsnackery helps to describe patterns of attraction and reinforces self-esteem at the expense of strangers in a way that cements bonds of friendship. Were someone to say “Olga, stop making eye contact; don’t encourage that guy’s clownsnackery,” Olga would know that a) she is desirable enough to be snacked upon, if only by clowns, b) she has been adjudged too good for such a clown by her peers, and c) that her friends are looking out for her welfare. Clownsnack is a word that turns common conversational work into a convenient kind of shorthand. Plus, it’s terribly fun to say.
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I could probably trim that entry down a bit (I don’t expect anyone to be quite as long-winded as I am), but it represents something like the work I have in mind. Because the semantic survey is a semester-long project, feel welcome to post entries (on a blog or in a journal) when leisure and language intersect. The assignment is not technically due until late in the spring, but you can of course get it out of the way much earlier than that.
