Intellectual Property Law

Can?t We All Just Meep Along?

By Mike Madison

Via Language Log I learned about the great “meep” ban of 2009 (a high school principal in Danvers, Mass. warned students there not to say  “meep” in school,  connecting the word with disruptive behavior), but via the Salem (Mass.) News I picked up some extra flavor:  The warning followed intimations that students were organizing their “disruption” via Facebook. The Boston Globe reports that the meeping affair had a FB-based fallout: Meeping supporters used FB to meep-roll the meeping school administrators, who forwarded some meeping messages to the meeping police.

The whole thing has an air of unreality: a virtual student “club” planning a “disruption” (picture the kids in “A Christmas Story” putting plastic teeth in their mouths on cue, when one of them says “meep”); a school principal confusing an invented word for the act itself (imagine the late George Carlin reminding us of the horrors of the phrase, “Stop me before I meep again!”); the Facebook factor suggesting that any of this is new, or news.   Imagine Paul Lynde singing, “What the matter with kids today?”.

What meeps around, meeps around.

?You love him. That is so fetch.? ?Gretchen, stop trying to make fetch happen. It?s not going to happen.? (Mean Girls, 2004.)

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Full post as published by Madisonian.net on December 13, 2009 (boomark / email).