Mark A Mandel <mam at theworld.com> writes: > On Mon, 25 Nov 2002, Matthew Hunter wrote: > > #> At 12:02 11/25/2002 -0500, Casey Rousseau wrote: Actually, I think it was Pete Granzeau. > #> Donaldson just turns on my squick sensor. > # ^^^^^^ > # > #You keep using this word. I do not think it means what you think > #it means. > > As a matter of fact, the people I know who actually use that word, and > from whose use I learned it, use it in a way very close to Casey's use, > which the definition on that website (which I have seen before) has > almost nothing to do with. > > To the best of my knowledge, "squick", in the usage of people who USE > the word, as opposed to inventing oddball definitions for words they > don't use (cf. _The Meaning of Liff_, Douglas Adams & somebody else), is > an experiencer-as-object verb meaning approximately 'disgust, nauseate; > turn off or repel (i.e., cause [someone] to feel turned off or > repelled]'. -snip- My impression was that "squick" was coined on alt.sex or alt.sex.bondage roughly around the 1990s (but maybe that was only where I saw it first) to refer to sexual things that were squicky. I think the story goes that a term was desired and that was a canonical (for some value of "canonical") example, so "squick" was born because it is onomatopoe(t)ic for that act. It is possible that the term was invented, and then people wanted a canonical example, and s[censored]-fucking was the winner because it was so squicky and had the benefit of having "squick" be onomatopoe(t)ic for it. Its meaning then became more general, not necessarily related to things sexual. So much for my fallible memory of fallible folklore. Let's see if we can get some concrete evidence. Googling for "squick" on alt.sex yields a post on 1991/9/29 by Richard Chandler, where he refers to "the a.s.b [alt.sex.bondage] term Squick" http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=28E385CB.6B2D%40intercon.com Googling for "squick OR squicks OR squicking OR squicked" on alt.sex.bondage for dates up through the end of May 1991 didn't yield anything terribly definitive about its origins. However, Googling on that date range suggests that its appearance on Usenet was in alt.sex.bondage: 22 hits for alt.sex.bondage, 0 hits for alt.sex. There were a total of 37 total "hits". Most non-ASB hits were in alt.tasteless; Alt.sex/ASB regular STella used it once in rec.pets; the other "hits" appear to be false positives, e.g. "sQuick" in comp.sys.mac, or "squicked the tent" in rec.arts.movies. I believe Google's archives are pretty spotty when you get back that far, so it's not clear to me how much confidence should be put in the search results, but I'd say it looks pretty likely that "squick" got its start on Usenet in ASB. - tky