What Were the Names of Your High School Tribes?

At the Morning News, a seriously fascinating look at the nomenclature of teenage social groups, in which “four crowds — jocks, smart kids, popular kids, and deviants — are said by adolescent researchers to be standard in American high schools.”

There’s a chart tracking nicknames for these groups over the last 70 years; in 1942, the deviants were the “grubby gang,” then “greasers” and “leathers” in the late ’60s, then dirtheads/stoners in the late ’80s, freaks/goths in the early ’00s, and now: “hoochies,” “thugs,” and “Crack Group.” There’s also a discussion of how high schools weren’t big enough for these ecosystems till the ’40s, and how middle school groupings tend to gravitate towards actual physical space inhabited (i.e. “the kids that eat lunch in the drama room”) but then slide towards abstract self-identification by high school (i.e. emo).

What were your high school groups called? And which were you a part of? If you’re going to say “I sort of went back and forth between social groups,” that’s cool, I’d probably say that too, but so would a lot of people: in one study, “76 percent of the kids indicate they belong to multiple crowds.”

[TMN]