I think a lot of it has to do with the community you were in. I grew up in a poor to middle class community. Nobody had “money” or drove BMW’s to school. I was voted “Most Popular” in my senior class, and my family was far from having money. I was a cheerleader, but I never picked on anyone or was cruel. Most of the people in my school, I knew since at least 7th grade - and about 1/3 since kindergarten. I was also valedictorian of my class, so I was friendly with the “smart kids”.
My high school only had about 400 people in it when I graduated, and I am glad because we didn’t have all the crap that lots of kids had to deal with. In my school, I think popular meant that you went to parties, were semi-attractive, participated in school activities, and were nice.
I was never “popular”, because I’m not a sociable person to begin with, but I wasn’t made fun of either.
Everyone in the multi-thousand student district knew who I was, because I volunteered my time to write a huge amount of custom software for the school that all the students and teachers used on a daily basis, and most of the kids who were assholes to everyone else seemed to respect me for that. I also showed up to school one day in a new BMW that I paid for myself, which shut up the remaining jerks.
I remember once at lunch, I overheard some of the popular kids classifying the non-popular kids into categories: “nerd”, “geek”, “loser”, etc. Then they brought up my name. There was a brief pause, and a few of them said in unison: “boss”. I liked that.
“Popular” was a pretty meaningless concept at my high school; we had 400 students and were the only high school in our little town, so we all knew each other since pretty much birth.
I was friends with pretty much everybody, and I was generally well-liked, despite a penchant for arrogance. The girls were not, as a rule, into me, since I was overweight and geeky, but I also wasn’t trying very hard. I was not invited to the big wild parties, even though I would hang out with some of those same people at school; in talking about it later, a lot of them said they just never thought to tell me about it since I probably wouldn’t have been into it.
There were two definite social groups in most classes; the best way I could describe it is the people who “fit in” and the people who didn’t. There was no sort of hierarchy or deliberate exclusion or hostility–just different circles.
