Creepers

One of the great things about being alive and young in this modern age is the fact that people keep coming up with exciting new words for stuff. It's interesting to watch things that have been around since the dawn of time finally get the names that they so deserve. I get that you needed to create the word "telephone" when someone featured out you could telegraphically communicate, um, phonically with someone. But words like cougar, creeper, lingerer? Bromance had its fifteen minutes, a passing word for a passing fad, but these are enduring terms, like "computer" or "sandwich" that are here to stay.

I think cougar as a word may be well past its expiration point, but I think we are so permissive with the idea because it is such a perfect word. Calling someone a "Mrs. Robinson," while more high-brow, was always sort of cumbersome.

But creeper? Fuck yes. Give me more where that came from, invisible wordsmith. Even the urbandictionary entry is written in prose at once florid and blunt, playfully succinct like Hemingway at his best:

A person who does weird things, like stares at you while you sleep, or looks at you for hours through a window. usually a close friend or relative. you know right away if that person is a creeper or does creeper things. it is not hard to spot the creeper.

Creeper is versatile as a term, because unlike cougar (and creeper's cousin, lingerer) it is more of a point on a spectrum. Instead of just thinking of your friend Winchester as that guy who stares a little too long, and says inappropriate things to women, Winchester is now a data point somewhere between Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs and an Easter Island statue, and its funny because he's much closer on the spectrum to the former than the latter. Oh Winchester, such a creeper. Don't creep too hard Winchester, that line between you and pederasty is closer than you think! And so on.

And then there is the "hard creep." The hard creep, cousin of the lurk, is more premeditated and self-aware. When creeper becomes to verb "to creep," it somehow gains a lightheartedness, or at least loses some of its awkwardness. A creeper is a sad individual, while someone creeping might just be having a good time. The hard creep is the apex. If you've ever spent a lot of time at a small college, or with a tight group of friends where everyone has already dated and/or lived together, then you know the hard creep. The hard creep is when you stop giving a fuck and turn into a human paint mixer. Not only are you out to find those new acquaintances that have been hiding somewhere weird this whole time, but you're out to make someone weird out of those acquaintances you already have.


Note: facebook stalking is not "creeping." It is just facebook stalking. It's good though.


PS Holy fuck what is this? Theory of Flux Creep in Hard Superconductors


All of those words are maaaaaaagical