What unique clique nicknames do you remember?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

In high school, college, or elsewhere that would lend itself to such things, what specific clique nicknames were used in the community?

I’m not looking for generic terms like “frat boy”, “jock”, “nerd”, nor for actual names of groups (fraternity letters, “College <political party affiliation>”, SCA, etc.), but for example…

At my college the members of the hockey team were referred to as “pucks” (as in “dumb as a puck”). “Jock” might refer to any member of any of the sports teams, but “puck” specifically identified a hockey player. “Is he missing his front teeth?” “Yeah… he’s a puck.” Pucks even referred to themselves and each other as pucks.

We also had “Cranees” (there’s no convenient spelling, it was pronounced ‘CRANE ees’), “drama llamas” (yes, becase “alpaca” didn’t rhyme), and "art fgs" for students in the music, drama, and art departments respectively. (Sorry about the last one, this was 20+ years ago and times, and acceptable usages, have changed. For the record, there was at least one puck art fg. He got a scholarship to play and picked an easy major (art history).)

From contemporary pop culture I think the Heathers from the movie Heathers might qualify. Even though only three in the clique were named “Heather”, the term “Heathers” was used to identify all four.

So… pucks, Heathers, drama llamas.

What unique clique names do you remember?

2

The only unusual one I can think of is ‘freaks,’ applied to the kids who did drugs.
We had the usual ‘jock,’ ‘prep,’ ‘brainiac,’ ‘nerd’ and ‘drama dork.’

What was a Cranee?

3

BiblioCat, interesting that you called them Freaks too.

That was the first thing I thought of when I opened this thread - in my school the “freaks” were the kids who wore black concert t-shirts, smoked, often had long hair; the sort of “bad boys.”

There were also jocks. Occasionally you’d get an athletic Freak who played sports, and such people were FROCKS.

4

Exactly the same at my school. There were also “fags” or “nerds” who did neither.

That was junior high. In high school, there was less labelling.

5

A student enrolled in the Crane School of Music.

Pronounced like the word “cranium” but leaving off the “-um” part.

Like I said, there’s no convenient way to spell it. Crane-ie? Crane-y?

6

Yes! This is what I meant.

7

“Narcs” were kids who were newly sober and pushy about it. The most extreme of these were the “Straights” who were part of a near-cult called “Scared Straight” which inculcated entire familes and completely bound up their free time in hard-core evangelistic activities.

We also had “Punks” who were basically Adam Ant (or for the more sincere Annie Lenox) wannabes. Some Eurythmics fans were referred to as “andro’s”.

8

Our school had “mechanics” who were the kids who actually were going to the vo-ed to study auto mechanics. But they wore their name-badged garage uniforms to school and had their Megadeth hats on backwards and often appeared to be un-washed with grease under their fingernails. Within their group there were most likely kids who were not smart enough to even go to vo-ed to study auto mechanics, and kids who just spent a lot of time hanging around the shop class.

Oddly enough this was the only group that didn’t get along with us Band Geeks. Mechanics tend to be patriotic and our particular brand of Band Geek happened to be quite Liberal. One day at a pep rally some band kids decided not to stand during the national anthem, and this pissed the mechanics off mightily. There was nearly a fist fight in the parking lot after school, until the Mechanics realized that Band Geeks included some serious Studs.

9

I don’t know how widely the term was used but we refered to them as “burnouts”. This was in the mid 80s in the midwest.
More of a slang term for pothead but we still used it.

10

What you call “Freaks” we called “Velts” because they lived in an isolated area called “Roosevelt”, a semi-failed WPA-built town.

Rumor had it (never was able to confirm) that the failure was because the blueprints were mixed up with a similar town in Arizona. The NJ one got the flat roofs and the AZ one got peaked ones, neither appropriate for the climate.

In college, we had “throats” who would sabotage your work in order to move themselves up the grading curve. Don’t know that that was a clique as much as a rumored guerrilla group :slight_smile:

Edit: yes, “burnouts” was more common in mid-late 70s NJ. Freaks, not so much.

11

Wow, that triggered a high school flashback. :smiley: I’d forgotten about the burnouts.
Burnouts were a subset of the freaks. Harder drugs, scarier overall. I guess they were the hardcore freaks.

12

Now that’s good stuff right there.

13

We have techies- who were the group of people who were the operators of the stage crew technical aspects during plays and school events. They called themselves techies or “The Crew” and others just called them techies though.

14

The Boces (BO-seez) were the burnouts who were sent to remedial classes and taught how to work on car engines and such at the Board Of Cooperative Educational Services. Calling someone a bocey outside of New York State generally provokes head-scratching, but I successfully exported the term to Virginia during my undergrad days.

Batcavers were the proto-goths with dark eye makeup, black clothing and pale complexions.

Flockers were any of the weirdos who had hair like A Flock of Seagulls.

15

Pronounced “poh - theed”, of course.

16

One school I went to had proto-Goths, but they were called “Artsies” and they were not morose or emo, . Mostly they were cool nerds dressed in black, heavily affiliated with the Drama Club. They tended to be a bit energetic so they were also known as “Muppets” which I actually find more fitting, despite the general lack of color.

17

When I started elementary school, the special ed classes went by “mekhina”, which is Hebrew for beginner/remedial/catch-up. The name was changed soon after, but the mainstreamers went on calling us mekhina anyway. Usually in the context of, “Mekhina alert! The retards are coming! Hey, dummies, if you go into our part of the playground we’ll beat you up!” No, I’m not still bitter about as an adult, why do you ask?

Does mainsteam count? In the Special-Ediverse, the world is starkly divided into two: special, and Mainstream. Mainstream could be a class, an activity, a person, a whole school (or in one case, a gerbil) or anything primarily meant for Normal Kids. Being mainstreamed was a big deal. Hey, they’re letting you in with the big kids.

18

In my high school, circa 1974, we stole freely from the book “The Outsiders”, which was wildly popular.

The popular “in crowd” were “Socs” (pronounced Soshes) and the auto shop guys were “greasers”. We were a pretty weed friendly school and pot smoking transcended all social groups but “hard cores” were experimenting with harder stuff. We had a lot of really religious types and they were “red” as in rednecks but not redneck-y in the way most people think of it. More like “red” meant uncool. Narcs was also used to describe people that might rat you out to the authorities.

19

Not *quite *what you’re looking for, but an ex girlfriend’s sorority sister’s nickname was “The Black and Decker Pecker Wrecker”.

20

Burnout was widely used also, often abbreviated to “burnies”.