Quote: (10-01-2011 12:58 PM)basilransom Wrote:
A girl who's in an athlete house probably has a strong social life, and has an aversion to dates, especially with "randos." Girls with very active social lives can be very cliquey, and not open to meeting up with men they don't know or meet through approved channels. After all, they don't need to.
This.
There was a NY Times article recently about the emergence of new terms like "creeper, rando, sketchball" in recent years, abetted by the explosion of social media. No doubt it's mainly college girls creating and perpetuating these terms. It complicates things for the day gamer .
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/31/magazi...age-t.html
Quote:Quote:
When Liana Roux, a junior at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, was reading a Facebook event page for her friend’s birthday party recently, she noticed a terse proviso at the end of the announcement: “No randos.” The friend wanted only people she knew to come to her party and thus sought to bar any random strangers, or randos, in collegiate parlance.
...
Rando is one of a surprisingly large number of words that U.N.C. students use to refer to unfamiliar, suspicious or anxiety-producing outsiders. Skimming the lists that Eble has collected from recent classes, I kept spotting a familiar pattern: along with rando, there are nouns like creeper, sketcher and sketchball and adjectives like dubious, grimy, sketchy, sketch and skeazy. Sketchy and sketch have, in fact, been among the most frequently attested words culled from Eble’s students for the past several semesters.
...
Even if these terms describing creepy outsiders aren’t necessarily novel, the question remains: Why do they occur in such profusion on the U.N.C. slang lists? Eble points out that the words are typically used by women, who currently make up nearly 60 percent of U.N.C.’s student population. Compared with past generations, Eble said, “female students are putting themselves into more dangerous situations than they did in my day,” especially when it comes to dating and partying. Terms like creeper, rando and sketchball come in handy as women deal with men who may try to give them unwanted attention.
In interviews I conducted with Eble’s students, one recurring theme that emerged was the impact of technology and social media on the need to patrol social boundaries. “With Facebook and texting,” Natasha Duarte said, “it’s easier to contact someone you’re interested in, even if you only met them once and don’t really know them. To the person receiving them, these texts and Facebook friend requests or wall posts can seem premature and unwarranted, or sketchy.”
....
Lilly Kantarakias said she believes that the shift to technologically mediated exchanges among students is leading to a “loss of intimacy” and that this failure to engage in human contact is responsible for the rise in all of the “sketchy” talk. “People have lost both their sense of communication and social-interaction skills,” Kantarakias said. “We know only how to judge people off of a Facebook page or we easily misinterpret texts or e-mails. You can see it in the way people walk around campus, texting on their cells, being completely oblivious to the hundreds of people surrounding them. We’ve become lazy with our speech and our social profiling of fellow human beings.”
Roux observed that “as college students, we navigate through an enormous social landscape every day.” The slang words for suspicious outsiders “create a distance between ‘us’ and ‘them,’ between our clique and the creepers.” These “terms of exclusion,” as Roux sees them, don’t just separate an in-group of students from potentially dangerous people but also from “people we just dislike or people who are perceived as different or weird.” And that type of behavior, even if it is complicated these days by new technology, new social pressures and new slang expressions, is surely as old as the hills.
Day gamers on college campuses especially must be especially weary of not being tagged with these labels!