Wednesday November 28, 2007
Search for the impossible
By GRANT BARRETT
NOTES FROM THE LANGUAGE UNDERGROUND
IN his 1952 memoir, Always the Young Stranger, poet Carl Sandburg wrote that when he was a newspaper carrier boy – he delivered the news to people’s front doors – he was told to be on the lookout for type lice.
New carriers, he wrote, would be told to peer among the trays of metal type in search of the tiny insects. When they did so, they’d be squirted with a wet sponge by a co-worker, and dowsed with laughter, too.
Of course, there were no type lice, no more than there were italic spaces, another impossible thing printers’ apprentices were asked to find. Both are part of a long-standing tradition of workplace hazing.
It is a ritual in schools, sport, the workplace, and elsewhere. It’s both a way of putting the new worker or ignorant person in his place – “You have no status here” – and a way of bonding – “Remember that time we pulled one over on old Joe?”
To haze is to pull a prank, to trick, to tease, to embarrass. Hazing traditions tie generations of workers together across the years.
Sending the new kid to fetch something that doesn’t exist or to do something that cannot be done is a common way to haze. Examples collected in the journal American Notes & Queries in the 1940s find hazing in chemistry, fisheries, fishing, sailing, college football (“Go out and roll up the scrimmage line”–a scrimmage line is made of chalk dust on the grass), baseball, construction, auto repair, farming, and youth camps.
The granddaddy list of such shenanigans must be that collected by the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE). As part of its survey of American regional dialects in the 1960s, DARE fieldworkers asked participants from across the United States about “ways of teasing a beginner or inexperienced person – for example, by sending him for a ‘left-handed monkey wrench’.”
A monkey-wrench – better known to English-speakers outside North America as an adjustable spanner – has no handedness, of course. It’s not like a guitar, which has to be specially made for southpaws.
A brand-new construction worker might not know that, though, or that there’s no such thing as a left-handed hammer, and he might be reluctant to question the orders of a new boss. Off he goes searching in vain.
Would a new restaurant busboy or dishwasher know that there isn’t such a thing as a left-handed sugar bowl, coffee cup, or frying pan? I don’t know, but confusing people in this way has been mighty popular. DARE’s respondents gave 38 different kinds of imaginary left-handed things for which they’d send the greenhorn, newbie, or noob.
The most popular prank among DARE respondents, however, was snipe-hunting. A city-slicker or rube – someone who doesn’t know a thing about hunting or the countryside – is led into the deep woods late at night with an empty sack and a candle or flashlight (British torch).
The sucker – the victim – is told to hold open the sack and to whistle, sing, make kissing noises, or even stand stock-still in order to lure the snipe right into it. The perpetrators go home for a laugh while the snipe-hunter is left to make his way home alone after realising he’s been had (that is, made a fool of).
(Snipes are a type of water bird, but they make poor catching and bad eating, and the prank would work just as well if you used cockatoos or quail.)
Other mythical things to be sent for in the workplace include buckets of steam, bags of electricity, wheelbarrow seed, and fifty feet of shoreline.
A different kind of hazing is chiefing, practised largely among American college students of the rowdy, rather than studious, type. A student who passes out from tiredness or drunkenness risks having their face painted, their head (or other regions) shaved, and having things stacked on their body: cans, bottles, trash, even furniture. Photos are snapped and posted to the Internet. A good time is had by all but one.
In certain segments of military life, there is a tradition known as blood-pinning, in which awarded medals are pinned directly to the skin of a soldier’s chest, sometimes with brutal, hammering force. It’s a test of will-power.
Significantly, hazing is often about putting others through what you yourself have suffered. Sandburg wrote that after getting an eye full of water, “You tried to be on hand when a new boy put his head down to see ‘type lice’.” Clearly, hazing is driven by schadenfreude: delight in another’s misfortune.
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