The Boston Globe published an article a few weeks ago, entitled "Meep! The power of the meaningless!"
link below:
http://www.boston.com/...
This is a total hoot for me, as Miep was not my given name...I legally changed it in 1995, but for decades before that I was going by "Meep," in various and sundry pre-blog newspaper classified ad forums, and as a nickname as well. The classified ad forums were run by the L.A. and Chicago Readers, and were fun crazy places where you could send in 3x5 cards with an assortment of words of your choosing, and they would publish it all for free on one page of the paper. Very proto-blog.
Somewhere along the line, I learned that "Meep" really was a name, in Dutch, but spelled "Miep," and it was pointed out to me that Miep Gies was the woman who helped Anne Frank's family. I read "Diary of a Young Girl" when I was one myself, so I changed the spelling when I changed my name legally, to honor Miep.
That was all many years ago. Meanwhile, what am I to make of this article?
A few weeks ago, Thomas Murray, the principal of Danvers High School, banned the word meep from his school. Parents and students were warned, by automated calls and e-mails, that saying (or even "displaying") the word meep would be grounds for suspension.
Supposedly, students at Danvers were meeping in "disruptive" ways, and hadn’t responded to teachers’ and administrators’ requests to, well, quit it already, leading to the all-out ban. "It has nothing to do with the word," Murray told The Salem Evening News. "It has to do with the conduct of the students. We wouldn’t just ban a word just to ban a word."
They go on to discuss the promulgation of "Free Meep!" t-shirts, and the fact that there is a Facebook "Meep" group that has more than 5000 members.
This last quote from the article:
In Danvers, meep came to mean: "We’ll obey your rules when we feel like it." And that, in the end, made it a dirty word.
I rock.