SUE DE GROOT | Learning curves: get your hooks into the lingo like a good hooker

“Hook” is a word oft heard in media companies. “What’s the hook to this story?” an editor might ask a reporter, meaning: what about the article is relevant, topical, timeous and of wide general public interest?

Hook, however, has dozens of other meanings, and can be hooked on to many other words to create even more meanings.

The idiom “by hook or by crook” has fallen mostly out of use but is still heard here and there. Meaning “to get something done by means fair or foul”, this phrase dates back to the 1400s. The Phrase Finder says that its most likely origin is from “the custom in medieval England of allowing peasants to take from royal forests whatever deadwood they could pull down with a shepherd’s crook or cut with a reaper’s bill-hook.”

But let us move on to more recent hooking.

I recently embarrassed myself by misusing a “hook” derivation. When I discovered that I was going to be in the same place on a particular day as a friend in her late teens, I said what I thought was an extremely cool thing to say.

“That’s so dope,” I said. “Why don’t we hook up?”

At this, my young friend blanched and turned horrified eyes to me.

“Sue,” she said, “I’m so sorry to tell you this, but I’m actually straight.”

It is quite lovely that modern-day teens feel a little disappointed to tell you that they are straight, or cisgender, presumably because all the alternatives seem more interesting, but the clanger I’d dropped made me cringe for days.

“To hook up” or “hooking up” or “the hookup” no longer means meeting someone for a chat or a shopping trip or a cone of stracciatella ice cream.

It means sex.

Most of you probably already know this, but I clearly hadn’t been paying enough attention to language shifts and nuances.

The website slang.net says that “to hook up with” generally means “to become physically intimate with a person who is not your significant other (SO). It typically involves sexual activity but may be limited to just kissing in more innocent contexts.”

A few months ago I lamented in this column the reduced usage of the word “snog”, which used to mean “flirting or cuddling”. Snog has become more hardcore, but hooking up has surpassed it in amorousness.

Snog has become more hardcore, but hooking up has surpassed it in amorousness.

In 2000, the New York Times published an essay about the hookup, in which linguist Michael Safire wrote: “The compound noun hook-up (which The Times no longer hyphenates) was born in a political context in 1903, as ‘a hook-up with the reform bunch’, and meant a general linkage. In 1930, the term became specific, as ‘a national hook-up’ came to denote a radio network.

“As a verb, to hook up has for a century also meant ‘to marry’, a synonym of ‘to get hitched’, as a horse is to a wagon. But not until the 1980s did the meaning change to a less formal sexual involvement. It was first defined as ‘to pick someone up at a party’ and then progressed to ‘become sexually involved with; to make out’.”

I can’t help wondering whether this form of hooking had less to do with attaching a horse to a carriage (and in a marriage, which is which?) or whether it attaches somehow to the fairly ancient meaning of “hooker”, which the Online Etymology Dictionary says derives from the 19th century label for residents of Corlear’s Hook, a section of New York City known for houses of ill repute, where prostitutes plied their trade to eager clients.

This in turn was tied to the 16th-century definition of “hook”, meaning to catch either a fish or a wife (or husband).

By the way, please note that this type of hooker and these ways of hooking have nought to do with the likes of Deon Fourie, Joseph Dweba and Mbongeni Mbonambi, whose hooking skills owe their language origins to the way they “hook” or “rake” the ball out of a scrum with their dextrous feet.

I’m not sure whether this column has a hook, but I am quite certain that I will never again suggest to a member of Generation Z that we “hook up”. Oh, the shame.